Project advances might be rare. However, you can take advantage of seeing the conditions to create your advance. I’m at the Agile 2018 conference this week. Yesterday, I was scheduled to deliver my Agile and Lean Roadmapping talk at 10:45 am. However, the room was full 15 minutes in advance. I checked with the volunteers—yes, they […]
I explained about objectives and the differences between MBOs and OKRs in Part 1. I’m tackling the issues of “accountability” in this part. Examine Accountability What does accountability mean to you? I’m serious about that question. For many people—managers included—people are accountable when we can blame them for not doing something. If you don’t achieve
I have personal and professional goals. Sometimes, I state them as objectives: complete this book, learn that thing. Those are personal objectives. My personal objectives look like MBOs, Management By Objectives. These personal objectives contribute to my company, but they are not a corporate objective. Some of my goals are corporate objectives: release that book, build
I started this series positing that respect is the cornerstone for how we might treat each other, to manage our interactions with success, especially in light of the #MeToo conversation. The series so far is: Organizations Are Not Families, Part 1. Why the metaphor of family-as-org demeans the people working there. Build Respect in Organizations,
Ron Jeffries, Matt Barcomb, and several other people wrote an interesting thread about prescriptive and non-prescriptive approaches to team-based agile. The issues are nuanced and for me, don’t lend themselves to a Twitter discussion. (Learning how to write short and coherently is a different post.) If you don’t want to read the entire thread, here
As Mark Kilby and I work on the geographically distributed teams book, I realized this morning that we need to define cost per feature. I already wrote Wage Cost and Project Labor Cost and the management myth that it’s cheaper to hire people where the wages are less expensive. (It might be, but it might
Yegor Bugayenko asked me to be a guest on his podcast to talk about Hiring Geeks That Fit. I gladly accepted and the podcast is now up: Shift-M/10. We spoke about many issues in hiring: Laundry list/shopping list problem in job descriptions Starting with a “test” or a phone screen (I need to write a post
We might start to think about agile approaches as a project change. However, if you want to “scale” agile, the entire culture changes. Here is a list of the series and how everything changes the organization’s culture: Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 1: Creating Cross-Functional Feature Teams. Without feature teams, I don’t see how you can
One of the challenges I see in organizations is how managers can use agile approaches. One of the biggest problems is that the entire organization is organized for resource efficiency (think silos of functional experts). Agile approaches use flow efficiency. Thinking in flow efficiency changes everything. Many people in organizations believe that dividing up the
Own Your Leadership, Part 3 I started this story back in Own Your Leadership, Part 1: Dave and Sherry collaborated to facilitate their team’s ability to deliver one completed feature at a time, to improve the team’s throughput and quality. In Own Your Leadership, Part 2, Sherry realized the team doesn’t have a real PO,