Back when I was a manager, my senior management wanted to separate the “new” work from the “maintenance” work. I suggested that every new line after the first line of code was maintenance. The managers poo-poohed me. My concern: How would the “new” developers learn from their mistakes? I lost that discussion and I managed […]
A potential client called me. “What’s a good tool to see the state of my projects? I need a tool.” I asked, “What problems do you see?” “Everything is late. No one’s synchronized. I can’t tell where the projects are.” “How many projects do you have in progress?” “At least 100.” (I was pretty sure
You’ve got an impossible project. You have no flexibility. The project is a fixed-price, fixed-scope, fixed-date project. And, you have a specific team to do the work. (There are other impossible projects. Such as when you have a collection of people who multitask among several projects.) Can an agile approach save these projects? No. An agile
Part 1 was about seeing the value in the various projects. I called the value stream a product so that people would think about who would use it and why. I suggested that we stop work on specific products when you have more products than teams. That would allow you to work on other projects
I suggested ways to think about more agile budgeting in part 1. I didn’t tell you why. How do you budget your own money and time? If you’re like me, you have a plan for the year. I evaluate the plan—my products, services, and clients—on a regular basis. I always evaluate monthly. Sometimes, I evaluate
Too often, organizations want to budget for an entire year. The managers run around for two or three months in advance of that fiscal year, attempting to predict a ton of things: Estimates for not-well-defined projects or features, Capital equipment or tool needs, “Headcount” aka, people needed. Then, the organization doesn’t finalize the budget until
Manage “When” With a Parking Lot I’ve received several comments on the most recent Pragmatic Managers: Create Successful Schedules and Three Secrets to Creating Your Focus Time. Then, the writer asks, “What do I do when I have way too much to do?” Use a parking lot. Sometimes, I use a parking lot to kill
Ryan Ripley interviewed me on his podcast, Agile for Humans 83 about Create Your Successful Agile Project. We had a blast. I didn’t stint on my opinions or on my experience with agile teams. One of those opinions was about teambuilding, which I wrote about in Creating an Environment of Teamwork. The other opinion (based on
Henny Portman just published a review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. See his review at Review: Manage your project portfolio. He included a terrific image (go to the review to see it) about how you can think about the entire process, from soup to nuts. Here is an excerpt from his conclusion: “… a must
In the “Scaling” Agile: Part 1, I wrote about cross-functional collaborative teams. The cross-functional collaborative feature team is the basis for “scaling” agile. In “Scaling” Agile, Part 2, I wrote about programs. I realized I need another part before my original part 3 :-). This new part 3 is about creating agile product development capabilities.