Simone, a French project manager, emailed me. “Johanna, we are having trouble getting the people together. These people worked together before on the previous release. But on this release, they are not working together. I’ve done these things,” and she listed a number of smart ideas. I replied by email, “Where’s the project charter with […]
I hope that by now you see that you have any number of choices for your lifecycle if you are geographically distributed team and you are transitioning to agile. I do recommend a servant leader agile project manager, for coordination and risk management. With people all over the world, it’s difficult to coordinate the project,
Example 3: Using a Project Manager with Iterations and Kanban and Silo’d Teams Here, the developers were in Cambridge, MA, the product owners were in San Francisco, the testers were in Bangalore, and the project manager was always flying somewhere, because the project manager was shared among several projects. The developers knew about timeboxed iterations,
Vol 9, #3: Always Ask the Zeroth Question About Your Projects Jan 17, 2012, ISSN: 2164-1196 Sometimes, you wonder why you are doing this project. You spend all this time on it, you’re sure there isn’t much value from the project, and still, the project is on the top of your manager’s list. There’s
A reader asked why the lifecycle in Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1 is not Scrum. It’s not Scrum for these reasons: The project manager and product owner start the release planning and ask the team if the release planning is ok. The team does not generate the initial draft of release planning
Example 2: Using a Project Manager with Kanban, Silo’d Teams This is a product development organization with developers in Italy, testers in India, more developers in New York, product owners and project managers in California. This organization first tried iterations, but the team could never get to done. The problem was that the stories were
I’ve been working with geographically distributed and dispersed teams for the past couple of years. Some of them on quite large programs, some of them reasonably small. What they all have in common is that they all want to transition to agile. Most of them start this way: someone takes a Scrum class, gets all
My new Gantthead column is up, Who’s Playing Agile Schedule Games? If you liked the schedule games from the more traditional projects, you’ll love the agile schedule games. Please comment over there.
Vol 8, #8: Three Myths and Three Tips I have been fortunate this year to be working and speaking internationally. And, almost everywhere I go, some manager or project manager takes me aside. “Johanna, can I ask you a crazy question?” I always answer that I’m sure the question is not crazy. The manager shakes
I’ve been working with folks making their transition to agile. One of the hardest transitions is for the managers and technical leaders. Managers are accustomed to working in timeboxes. To them, the iteration is a timebox. But, they also are accustomed to features spanning multiple timeboxes, and that’s not OK in agile. They are accustomed