Anton Bangratz made my day today with his post, Management Myths Debunked by Johanna Rothman. He really liked Working Long? Rethink Why. I liked his reaction. Actually, I loved his reaction. Happy dance. The myths to date are here: The Myth of 100% Utilization Only the ‘Expert’ Can Perform This Work We Must Treat Everyone […]
At Agile 2012, Lisamarie Babik and I led an experiential workshop called Building a Team Through Feedback. We didn’t have slides; we had a first draft of an article as our handout. We worked on that article, and now we have a real article, Building a Team Through Feedback as our output. I had a
Many months ago, Rebecca asked an interesting question about technical debt in projects. She asked, How to start when there’s a really big mess? In that case, small, just being a professional clean-up acts may not even make a dent. Of course, as with any good question, the answer is, “it depends.” And the biggest
I’ve been having some strange email conversations with two testers, one business analyst, and a project manager. Yes, a total of four new people. They have each found jobs on projects. And, they are in over their heads. Each of them wrote to me, hoping I would help. The testers wanted to know how to
Do you use Iteration Zero for your agile projects? An Iteration Zero is an iteration where you set up all the servers, make sure you have a release plan, develop a product backlog, and in general do all those things that “assure” you that your project is ready to go. Some agile project managers do,
I wrote a series on cultural fit for my Pragmatic Manager email newsletter. In reverse order they were: How Do We Treat Each Other? What Does Your Organization Reward? What is Okay for You to Discuss? Those are the three biggies when you talk about organizational culture. That’s what candidates see when you hire. That’s
I delivered a keynote last week at StarWest, Becoming a Kick-A** Test Manager.” If you want to watch me in action, you can register for the virtual conference, and see a number of the keynotes and talks. I had an interview, too. I try to build interaction into all my talks, including my keynotes. I
Now, say you are looking for a job as an agile project manager. Some people might say that’s a crazy job. But hang in there with me for a minute. Imagine you have two or three teams, larger than two pizzas might feed. So, you might well need an agile project manager to coordinate the
In my talk, How Much Will this Project Cost? at Agile 2012 last week, I got to say, “Short is beautiful.” For those of you who have never seen me, I’m five feet tall. The question was something like this: For programs, don’t you want longer iterations, so people don’t have the overhead of planning,
Do you have a product owner who doesn’t want to admit to technical debt? “Give me another feature! And another feature! Just keep giving me features! It’s feature time, baby!” Once a product owner has the heady feeling of seeing features one after the other, it’s difficult for that product owner to consider anything other