The more I see teams transition to agile, the more I am convinced that each team is unique. Each project is unique. Each organizational context is unique. Why would you take an off-the-shelf solution that does not fit your context? (I wrote Manage It! because I believe in a context-driven approach to project management in […]
I have a new column up on project management.com. It’s called Debugging Your Geographically Distributed Agile Team. (You have to register to read it. Registration is free.) You can do agile with geographically distributed teams. You might not be able to do Scrum. You have other choices of approaches. Helping a team form is tough.
On Managing Product Development, I say that feature teams all over the world are fine. But, how do you hire these teams ? One way is to go to that country, hire the first person yourself, and have that person hire the rest. Another way is to hire someone here, wherever here is, and have
I had a great conversation last week with someone taking a leadership course. (Not one of my courses. His instructor wouldn’t talk to him!! He’d seen one of my posts and emailed me. Of course I talked with him.) He was confused by the word “Handoff.” He thought it meant that people hadn’t done their
I just read Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants: WordPress.com and the Future of Work. For me, it was a mixed read. Yes, you can make a totally distributed team work. What you need to do: Make all of the work visible Keep everyone focused on one project at a time Keep all of the
We’ve all read a lot about agile software development—the various flavors and methods sprouting up to tackle new issues in requirements, architecture, design, coding, and testing. But it’s rare to hear real, tangible, objective lessons based on the experiences of those who have tried some form of agile development and failed. Get ready to take
There are two sides of this conversation about telecommuting: the employee side and the management side. I hope you stick around for both sides. You can yell at me at the end. Employees: You Owe the Company a Full Day of Work I’ve been thinking since Marissa Meyer’s announcement what I would say about the
Note: I wrote this article in 2011. It was published in 2012. I hope at some point this article will be wrong. I hear all the time from people that “Agile has crossed the chasm. Agile is everywhere. Agile has made inroads to every organization, to every industry, yes, to every type of software development.
Do you use Iteration Zero for your agile projects? An Iteration Zero is an iteration where you set up all the servers, make sure you have a release plan, develop a product backlog, and in general do all those things that “assure” you that your project is ready to go. Some agile project managers do,
We understand how to swarm around a feature as a collocated team. But how do you do that when you are part of a geographically distributed agile team? It depends on how you are distributed and across how many time zones. How are you distributed? Too many geographically distributed teams are separated by function. That