I’m working on finishing a talk based on a recent Pragmatic Manager newsletter: Three Tips to Focus to Deliver Better Products Faster. I wrote that newsletter because I’d given several recent talks where the audience told me their “agile” teams could not collaborate. Those “teams” were component teams and they were not near each other. […]
When I wrote Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management, I included this chart, the Iterations Content Chart as part of a possible dashboard. I created that chart to clarify the challenges a specific team faced. They had problems with multitasking and the inevitable changes. The first way to use an iteration contents
When Mark, my husband, and I moved into this house a decade ago, we faced the problem many other people face: what to keep and what to toss (or recycle, etc.). Mark had a particularly difficult time with the kitchen drawer that held all the old baby dishes and utensils. I wanted to toss everything
If you use Scrum or any other iteration-based approach to your work, the team plans in batches for that next iteration. The iteration is a timebox. The batch is the amount of work the team thinks they can do in that timebox. If the batch is sufficiently small and your cycle time is sufficiently short,
Are you trying to use story points for estimation? If so, you might have encountered these problems: Story points reflect the ideal thinking of the team, not the actual experience of the team. Your managers don’t want story points—they want durations and dates. In the absence of sufficient information, everyone makes up fiction (human stories)
Do you have an overstuffed backlog the way Jenny did in Create More Success: How to Say No to “Everything” to Say Yes to What’s Necessary Now? I offered “now” advice in that newsletter. But what about the future? How can you prevent an overstuffed backlog, roadmap, or all those great ideas from interrupting your
Luke Pivac, a colleague from New Zealand, interviewed me last week. Here’s the video: We discussed several topics: My recent Unemployed Agilists posts. (That link just goes to the first post) My most recent book: Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility. Luke very kindly included (automatically generated) subtitles, which
I started this series by discussing why managers didn’t perceive the value of agile coaches and Scrum Masters in Part 1, resulting in layoffs.) Then, in Part 2, I asked those unemployed agilists to review their functional skills, the skills people need to do a product development job well. While those skills are useful, they
If you’re an unemployed agilist, you are not alone. There way too many of you. But the causes and solutions might not be clear to you. That’s why Part 1 of this series discusses your value and what managers want and need. That part discusses why managers see agile coaches and Scrum Masters as staff
Susan, an experienced senior leader, wondered what to do. Her company’s market was on a roller coaster. Increased revenue meant a lot more customers, who clamored for more features. So, the product leaders pressured the teams to deliver faster. But she’d been in a roller coaster situation before. After two years of stupendous growth, revenue leveled off in just one