A Workshop with Johanna Rothman and Shane Hastie, Pleasanton, CA, April 17-18, 2012. Geographically distributed projects are a reality in many organisations today; teams spread across multiple locations – diverse cities, states, countries, cultures and time zones. How can you work effectively in a geographically distributed agile team? Can a distributed team really go agile? […]
As I work with more organizations and across more cultures, I’ve been realizing that agile exposes a huge piece of the power in the organization that many people may not want exposed. I didn’t have a name for until I read Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. In it, he talks about Hofstede’s Power distance
Another key piece of culture is understanding a candidate’s background and preferences around rewards: what do you reward, how do you reward, and when. Let me be clear: I am not discussing what the organization should and should not reward here, although I have plenty of opinions. I am discussing how to detect what the
I bet you’ve seen teams like this: people are quiet, reserved and thoughtful. They discuss issues in moderated respectful tones and words. And, I bet you’ve seen teams whose favorite word is “brain-dead” when discussing ideas or people, who seem to need to have high volume discussions, and are loud. I bet you’ve seen teams
Dave’s comments on my most recent post got me thinking about doing a series of posts about interviewing for cultural fit. In my recent talks about management, I talk about cultural fit. One piece of cultural fit is knowing what you can discuss and not discuss. When you interview people, especially managers, you can’t ask,
I’ve been at the PMI Regina PDC this week. I did a general session talk Monday, and am leading a two-day estimation workshop through tomorrow. Andy Nulman had a great riff on normal vs. abnormal employees. You can see a clip of it here. Warning: racy, not completely clean. If you think of normal as
In a recent workshop, one of the participants explained, “I like to ask personal questions to see if the candidate will fit in with the team socially.” Well, that’s an illegal discrimination. * in the US, but not in other places. (It’s illegal because if you reject a candidate based on their answer, you’re discriminating
George Dinwiddie pointed me this post, I got rejected by Google – woe is me. Read through the comments; they are as illuminating as the post. Here’s the stated Google hiring strategy, Hiring: The Lake Wobegon Strategy. I don’t see Google’s stated practice of hiring above the mean as congruent with what’s happening in practice.
Interviews and how they are set up reflect on the hiring manager and the organization’s culture. If you want to read about some particularly bad interviews, take a look at Jerry Weinberg’s most recent article on the AYE site, Getting Some Good Out Of Bad Interviewing. It’s hard to believe, but every situation in this
So you thought the project was on schedule. And now, someone in power has requested you finish the project earlier. Earlier than you can manage with the people you’ve got.You have a bunch of options, including moving to 2-4 week iterations. But that’s something I would normally discuss on Managing Product Development 🙂 So, here