One of the challenges in a program is how you manage the checkins, especially if you have continuous integration. I am quite fond of continuous integration, no matter how large your program is. I also like short iterations. (Remember Short is Beautiful?) But imagine a product where you have a platform and layers. I’m separating […]
Imagine you are transitioning to agile. You are a program manager, with a couple of agile projects, and a couple of traditional projects. How do you manage the program? Here’s what a program team looks like. For the sake of argument, assume that Sally is an agile program manager, because we can tell she’s working
I keep hearing a lot about “chief” this and “chief” that when it comes to Big Agile, aka program management. You know, chief product owner, chief architect, that kind of thing. I’m kind of puzzled. I thought agile was all about self organization and no command-and-control. Chief anything reeks of command-and-control to me. At the
Are you interested in how to manage agile projects? Thinking of transitioning to agile? Available on March 7, 2013? I am leading an experiential one-day tutorial in conjunction with AgileIndy to introduce the ideas of agile project management to people who are interested in agile project management in Indianapolis on March 7, 2013. The tutorial
When I was in Brazil teaching the project portfolio workshop, one of the participants explained that his organization sometimes did a form of gold/silver/bronze comparison among the projects. Here’s how it works. Everyone wrote their project names on stickies. The first cut is everyone self-assigns their projects to Gold, Silver, Bronze categories. That’s right, everyone
I’ve been talking to a variety of potential clients about their project portfolios. One of the big problems is how to see all the work. Some of these folks have multiple kinds of projects, so they want to show their work in a variety of ways. What do you do when you have a few
I’m speaking on July 24 for the PMI Agile community of practice, delivering a webinar at noon Eastern about Agile Project Portfolio Management. If you are a PMI member, it is free. Please do join us!
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
Once you have a program (a collection of interrelated projects focused on one business goal) and you have technical debt, you have a much bigger problem. Not just because the technical debt is likely bigger. Not just because you have more people. But because you also geographically distributed teams, and those teams are almost always
I have released a beta book, Manage Your Job Search: Reduce Your Overwhelm, Focus Your Search, and Get Your Next Job! While I was writing and updating Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, second edition, I realized that my advice wasn’t precisely opposite for people who were searching for jobs. It’s too easy to become lost