project management

MPD

Influence and Authority Slides Posted

I delivered a keynote about influence and authority last week at Better Software/Agile Development Practices. I have also uploaded them to slideshare. For those of you who were not at the conference, I told a story about transitioning to agile as a running story throughout the keynote. I hope the slides stand alone. Maybe they

Articles

Swarming Across Distance

We understand how to swarm around a feature as a collocated team. But how do you do that when you are part of a geographically distributed agile team? It depends on how you are distributed and across how many time zones. How are you distributed? Too many geographically distributed teams are separated by function. That

management, MPD

Becoming a Leading Manager

My most recent post, We Cannot Choose Between Management And Leadership, has struck a chord. That’s the good news. The bad news is I have not defined enough terms. Okay, I’ll attempt that now. And, thank you, gentle readers, for hanging in there with me, waiting for my crazy travel schedule this spring. Many Kinds

MPD, program management

Programs and Technical Debt

Once you have a program (a collection of interrelated projects focused on one business goal) and you have technical debt, you have a much bigger problem. Not just because the technical debt is likely bigger. Not just because you have more people. But because you also geographically distributed teams, and those teams are almost always

Articles

Who’s Playing Agile Schedule Games?

“Hey, Jim, guess what? I incented my agile team to work faster and harder. I told them if they doubled their velocity, I would give them a team bonus. And it worked! In just one iteration, they went from 23 points to 46 points. Is that team a great team, or what?” – a not-so-agile

Articles

Roll Your Own (Agile Lifecycle)

Imagine this scenario: you want to transition to agile, and you have a geographically dispersed team with people all over the world. You have two developers in the UK and two in Boston, two testers in Portland, Oregon, a product manager in Brazil, and you, the project manager are in Sweden. And, you are pretty

newsletter

Distributed? Yes. Alone? No.

Distributed? Yes. Alone? No. As I’ve sent these Pragmatic Managers about geographically distributed teams and received these responses from many of you, I keep hearing one theme: “I thought I was the only one dealing with this issue.” You are not alone. Many of you have sent emails and asked questions. I answered those privately,

MPD, writing

Leanpub Podcast Up

A few weeks ago, Peter Armstrong interviewed me for Leanpub, to ask me why I enjoyed writing on Leanpub. That podcast is up now on the Leanpub Frontmatter Podcast page. What’s very funny is that the interview is a few weeks old. I had no idea he was going to post it right after I

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