Susan, a new-to-the-company program manager, could not understand why Product A was so late. The teams used a well-known agile approach. They weren’t working on anything else except for production support. Yet, even though the teams worked hard, not one team could meet any of their deadlines. The teams were unhappy with their progress. They […]
In Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1, I said that real agile approaches require cultural change to focus on flow efficiency, where we focus on watching the work, not the people. Too few organizations can do that. But teams can change how they work—in any approach. Here are three suggestions to emulate flow efficiency
I see many teams and team members who say, “Agile stinks. It’s a way to force me to work too fast and not finish anything.” When I ask people what’s happening, they say: We’re doing an agile death march because someone else already told us what we have to do and the date it’s due.
Susan, a senior leader of a 300-person department, wanted to reduce the risks of late deliveries, and respond to customers faster. Susan suspected the managers and teams were too wedded to their plans and not experimenting enough. That meant she needed an agile approach. But while she had been a part of several supposedly agile
Most projects encounter problems at some point, regardless of the size of the team and the people’s capabilities. For example, in a six-person team, TeamA, Tom resigned to follow his wife to her new job. Dick became quite ill and went out on short-term disability for the next three months. And Harry needed significant time
Too many managers don’t know how to manage remote people. Worse, those managers, or their organizations, don’t trust people to do a good job. The organization installs spyware to see if people are working. That’s classic Theory X behavior. However, people are smarter than the spyware. Many of these spied-upon people have installed mouse (and
About 20 years ago, I taught a project management workshop to IT people. Their products and services did not ship outside the building—their products and services enabled the organization to make money. During that workshop, the participants all had the same question, “How do we engage our stakeholders?” For years, I explained that the more
If we want more ease and better results, we need to be able to change when the world changes. Yet, we don’t always notice these changes, so we don’t create options and experiment. Too often, we feel as if the world drags us down. We double-down on what we’ve been doing. Instead, we need to
Work Solo or Collaborate? How to Choose Based on What Benefits You Do you prefer collaborative or solo work? Some of us prefer to work alone because we know how to be effective, even if our work is not independent of everyone else’s work. Or, if we work as part of a workgroup, such as
I started this series by realizing managers have (too) many decisions to make. The longer it takes managers to make any single decision, the longer it might take to make all the decisions. That’s Little’s Law, applied to decisions. In Part 1, I recommended that managers start with their oldest possible decision and decide what