I reported on my progress cleaning up my office Cleaning Up the Office, Round 2. I hadn’t let it get that bad since that round of organizing, but I did ask for help from Daughter #2 in May, to buy some bins and drawers to continue my never-ending attempts to stay organized. The past 8 […]
Guy in his We love Scrum at GigaSpaces, says something critical: […]we’ve been working in the past couple of months on upgrading our automated testing framework. I’ve been assigning five of my top engineers and architects on a project with the objective to provide the development team fast feedback and monitors on quality. Now
Esther, in her Get out of your way! post describes a situation where by our behaviors, we cause the thing we don’t want to happen. It happened to me this week. I’ve been working on the PM book, and I’ve been struggling with the lifecycle chapter for a couple of months now. Probably longer,
I have an all-in-one machine, a fax/copier/scanner/printer, that I use for copying, scanning and primarily faxing. It’s fine fax machine. And it’s a great copier. But when I hook it up to my computer for scanning to a file, it falls apart. Half the time (or more), my computer can’t establish a USB connection
One of my clients said to me, “There’s no one who doesn’t need a boss.” He meant it as “Everyone needs someone to check with, to make sure they’re headed in the right direction.” I agree.
Keith Ray, Dale Emery, and I are writing books. Keith and Dale are tracking their writing with spreadsheets. Dale is posting his progress online. You can see his Oct 8 progress.I decided they were on to something, and start tracking my progress in a spreadsheet also. I have about 35,000 words written. I have about
A colleague asked me what to do when you’re in an iteration and you realize that the story you’re working on spawns other requirements. I suggested that the person add them to the product backlog (the backlog of everything you want to do for the product) and re-rank the requirements in preparation for the next
Last week at SD Best Practices, I led an experiential half-day session about coaching. A significant number of the participants thought their job was to teach the other person what to do. (I think one person actually said “lead them to enlightenment.”) While it may be true in sports or school coaching, peer-to-peer coaching
There’s a fascinating email thread started by David Anderson about What would Agile Auditing Look Like?. Part of the discussion stems from what the definition of an audit is. Audits are about compliance to a defined process. Do we need audits? Sure, for some projects. I would very much like to know that any project
Want to save time on your next project? Improve working relationships? Understand what contributed to your success–or what didn’t? You’ll need a retrospective to do these things, and if you want a great retrospective, you’ll buy a copy of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great by Esther Derby and Diana Larsen. A retrospective provides