I was thinking about the Glen Alleman’s post, All Things Project Are Probabilistic. In it, he says, Management is Prediction as a inference from Deming. When I read this quote, If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. –Deming I infer from Deming that managers must […]
I was problem-solving with a potential client the other day. They want to manage their project portfolio. They use Jira, so they think they can see everything everyone is doing. (I’m a little skeptical, but, okay.) They want to know how much the teams can do, so they can do capacity planning based on what
I posted my slides for my Agile 2014 talk, Agile Projects, Program & Portfolio Management: No Air Quotes Required on Slideshare. It’s a bootcamp talk, so the majority of the talk is making sure that people understand the basics about projects. Walk before you run. That part. However, you can take projects and “scale” them
How to Avoid Three Big Estimation Traps I bet you need to estimate how large your project or program will be, at the gross level: “It’s bigger than a breadbasket. It’s smaller than a person on the moon.” More likely, “It’s about x people for about y months with this percentage confidence.” Or, you use
In a recent estimation workshop, one of the participants asked, “How do we estimate something we’ve never done before?” “Is it a feature or a project?” I asked. “A feature,” she said. “How do you do things now?” Based on her previous comments in the workshop, I suspected she was pretty good at what she
Workshop: Create Your Successful Agile (& Lean) Project Workshop Workshop Objective: Learn how to deliver value as a collaborative team. You’ll use agile and lean principles, and experiment with various practices to help you find your agile approach. Workshop Overview: As you practice with your project, you’ll learn how to create your collaborative team. Then,
In preparation for my talk, Agile Projects, Programs, and Portfolio Management: No Air Quotes Required, I have created a Minimum Reading List for an Agile Transition. Note the emphasis on minimum. I could have added many more books to this list. But the problem I see is that people don’t read anything. They think they
In my role as technical editor for agileconnection.com, I have the opportunity to read many terrific articles. I also have the opportunity to review and comment on those articles. One such comment is what do teams do? Do they “gel” or do they “jell”? Gel is what you put in hair. When you “gel” things,
Standup or Handoff? You have a geographically distributed agile team. You have team members more than six hours apart. (If you’re not sure how far apart people are, take a look at Managing Timezones in Geographically Distributed Teams). How do you have standups that mean something, when people have completed work, can commit to work, and
I published a Pragmatic Manager yesterday to my subscribers. Normally, I let them enjoy the pleasure of being “in-the-know” about what I have to say this month for a while before I post the emails to my site. Read the Pragmatic Manager here: Standup or Handoff. However, I made a Big Mistake in where I