Are you a manager accustomed to Management by Walking Around and Listening (MBWAL)? You can use MBWAL with collocated teams. MBWAL doesn’t work for distributed or dispersed teams. Remember, working remote is Not Business as Usual. (And won’t be for a while.) And, you might still have this question: “If no one’s in the office, […]
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.
Sprints, by definition, are a timebox. You’re supposed to say, “Pencils down!” at the end of the sprint, show your work and reflect. One of the big problems with new-to-agile teams is their inability to finish work inside a sprint. Each team is unique. However, I’ve seen these causes most often: Team members multitask, so
Imagine you are transitioning to agile. You are a program manager, with a couple of agile projects, and a couple of traditional projects. How do you manage the program? Here’s what a program team looks like. For the sake of argument, assume that Sally is an agile program manager, because we can tell she’s working
I’ve been talking to people whose management cares about their velocity. “My management wants us to double our velocity.” Or, “My management wants us to do more in a sprint.” Or, “My management wants to know when we will be a hyper-performing team, so they want to know when we will get 12x velocity like
Imagine this scenario: you want to transition to agile, and you have a geographically dispersed team with people all over the world. You have two developers in the UK and two in Boston, two testers in Portland, Oregon, a product manager in Brazil, and you, the project manager are in Sweden. And, you are pretty
You interviewed with a team a month ago, and you were a little concerned. It didn’t seem as if they were keeping to their iterations. Their product owner wasn’t grooming the backlog often enough to keep the backlog filled for the release meeting. They seemed to have an awful lot of defects piling up at
Agile projects, especially if you are starting your agile transition, can have plenty of problems. Some are technical debt problems, such as the build taking too long or having insufficient automated tests to know if your changes are helping or hurting the system. But there’s another insidious management problem when many teams transition to agile:
Summary: Keeping your team busy with work all of the time may seem good for productivity and a good use of your work force. But it comes with serious backlash in the form of delayed work, incomplete iterations, technical debt, and the negative consequences of multitask context switching. In this column, Johanna Rothman explains how
“Hey, Dan, it’s time for us to move to agile,” explained Tristan, a project manager. “Tristan, you’ve been singing that tune for a while,” replied Dan, a member of the PMO. “Well, now I have data that I think you can use with the rest of the PMO and with our senior managers. Look at