collaboration

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Three Secrets to Building Your Influence, Part 1, Competence

Three Secrets to Building Your Influence, Part 1, Competence If you want to change anything in your organization, you need to influence at least one other person to succeed. Mary, a leader in the organization, wanted to help her colleagues consider a variety of agile approaches. The organization had chosen a framework, and the framework […]

newsletter

Three New Year’s Tips to Ease Your Team’s Agility

Three New Year’s Tips to Ease Your Team’s Agility I hope you are all having a terrific holiday season. A reader asked me about tips I had to ease her project’s transition from waterfall to an agile approach. Woo! I have plenty, so I decided to select three tips I have seen work. Tip 1:

newsletter

Three Collaboration Secrets to Create Your Agile Culture

Three Collaboration Secrets to Create Your Agile Culture I’ve been working with managers and technical leaders on a big problem: How to create an agile culture. The managers and leaders want to create a successful agile culture. The people on the teams—they often want to be “left alone” to do their work. That’s not horrible.

consulting, MPD

Want to Work With Me to Start Your Consulting Practice?

I’m conducting a Hudson Bay Start for a new offering: a Consulting Workshop. What do I mean? Several people have asked me for help in creating or sustaining their consulting practices. Since I’ve done that for 25 years, I know what works for me. I know the strategies behind how I work. We can translate

agile, MPD

Where I Think “Agile” is Headed, Part 5: Summary

It’s time to wrap this series. I started asking if you actually need an agile approach in Part 1 and noted the 4 big problems I see. Part 2 was why we need managers in an agile transformation.  Part 3 was about how people want a recipe. Part 4 was about how “Agile” is meaningless

MPD, project management

Rethinking the Need for Generalizing Specialists

Early on in my agile practice, I believed in generalizing specialists. I even wrote Five Tips to Hiring a Generalizing Specialist. However, if a team becomes collaborative, I no longer think we need generalizing specialists. That’s because the team works and learns as a team. If a team is willing to collaborate as pairs, a

MPD, project management

Agile Project Kickoffs

I’ve led various project kickoffs over the years. Back in the closer-to-waterfall days, we had to introduce ourselves to each other. We could then move to the project purpose and release criteria. Now that agile teams stay together, we can change the kickoff to more project-specific work. I wrote an article several years ago, Keys

MPD, product ownership

Minimum Requirements Documentation: A Matter of Context

A colleague asked me about the kinds of documentation the team might need for their stories. He wanted to know what a large geographically distributed team might do. What was reasonable for the stories, the epics, and the roadmap? How little could they do for requirements documentation? I start with the pattern of Card, Conversation,

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