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. […]
Sharon poked her head into Heath’s cubicle. “Hey, Heath, are you done yet with that fix?” Heath turned around. “Sharon, you asked me that less than an hour ago. I’m not done yet.” “Well, I need to know when you will be done. Oh, and I need to know if you’re using the design we
Three Tips for Becoming a Servant Leader You and I both know that we’re not supposed to boss people around anymore, that we’re supposed to be servant leaders. Well, a client asked me, “What the heck is servant leadership?” When you’re a traditional manager, you might have thought of accumulating people and power. If you
I had a boss who was great at saying, “Terri did this. Jen did that. JR did this other thing.” We all knew who had learned about different areas of the system, who had succeeded at which parts of testing or development or project management. It was great. She didn’t just tell us. Nope, our
Did you see Dwayne Phillips’ post today, Adding People to a Late Project? Dwayne says: Adding people to a late project only makes it later. We have known this for decades. Especially in the article he refers to, it seems as if there might be no end to the number of people added. Did anyone
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
If you read my most recent post, Comparing Teams Is Not Useful: Exposing Another Management Myth and the comments, you will see that I rant about the business of normalizing story points for predicting cost or schedule for a program. That led to several comments re SAFe for programs or other frameworks or lifecycles for
I gave a talk last week at Better Software/Agile Development, called Exploding Management Myths. This is my first talk based on some of my management myths. Yes, the ones I’ve been writing for the last 18 months. Yes, I have more in me 🙂 I have posted the slides and the audio from my talk
I delivered a keynote at Let’s Test in Sweden last week, “Becoming a Kick-Ass Test Manager.” A lovely gentleman, Aleksis Tulonen, recorded the audio. Thank you, Aleksis! I attempted to marry the audio to the slides. I was not successful. However, the audio is up on slideshare. You can download the slides, page through them
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