If you are not on my Pragmatic Manager email list, you might not know about these opportunities to explore several topics with me this month: An Estimation hangout with Marcus Blankenship this Friday, April 10, 2:30pm EDT. If you have questions, please email me or Marcus. See the Do You Have Questions About Estimation post. Think […]
Some of my coaching clients have way more to do than they can manage. Some of my project portfolio clients are struggling with how to say no. My most recent Pragmatic Manager newsletter is all about what to do when you have too much to do. Read it at Do You Have Too Much to
Do You Have Too Much to Do? If you are like most of the people I work with and meet, you have too much to do. You’d like to say, “No!” to more work, but maybe you’re not sure how. The first step is to gather all the work, so you and everyone else knows
I was thinking about the best projects and teams I know. They work in different industries and have different customers. Some are engineering teams. Some are IT. Some are agile; some aren’t. Some are in transition. One thing they have in common is that they are happy teams. If you asked them to show you
I’ve been talking with clients recently about their managers’ and HR’s transition to agile. I hear this common question: “How do we manage performance of the people on our agile teams?” Reframe “manage performance” to “career development.” People on agile teams don’t need a manager to manage their performance. If they are retrospecting at reasonable
Creating an Environment of Leadership I bet you have some problems that have been problems for a while. Or, you want to influence other people to change. You need an environment of leadership, because you can’t do it alone. Here are three tips to creating an environment where everyone can lead: Tip #1: Share the
You have an open position. You have two internal candidates. You’re going to hire one of them. (See Two Candidates, One Position.) Now you have a problem. You have one person who will not be happy. This often occurs when you have two candidates for technical leadership or management positions. You might have a political problem.
Many organizations create teams by their architectural part: front end, back end, middleware. That may have worked back in the waterfall days. It doesn’t work well when you want to implement by feature. (For better images, see Managing the Stream of Features in an Agile Program.) Pierce Wetter wrote this great article on LinkedIn, There is
Is there room for functional managers, such as development and test managers, in agile organizations? Maybe. It depends on whether they take the role of an agile manager. If you have organized as a feature teams-based organization, the functional managers (development, test, analysis, whatever) can take these responsibilities: Develop trusting relationships with the people on
The nice folks at Social-Hire interviewed me. That interview is here: Expert Interview with Johanna Rothman About Hiring Technical People. I hope you enjoy it! If you want to learn how to hire—fast, and without fear—read Hiring Geeks That Fit.