In Part 1, we discussed the cost of delay of not shipping on time. In Part 2, we discussed the cost of delay of multitasking. In this part, we’ll discuss a cost of delay due to management indecision. Here’s a problem I encounter often. A middle manager calls me, and asks for an estimation workshop. […]
While I was on vacation in early January, there were two interviews posted on InfoQ: Ben Linders interviewed Esther Derby, Don Gray, and me about the Change Artistry book. I’m really pleased about the way the interview came out. Thanks, Ben! Back at Agile 2013, Shane Hastie interviewed me. The interview is here. We spoke
I have posted several slideshares for your reading pleasure. You won’t get the pleasure of my humor, eye rolling and jokes. Nope, for that you would have had to hear me speak. In September, I spoke at AgileSoCal, and had an interactive talk, Agile Teams and Collaboration: What’s New About Agile? I have a small
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
This is the last in this series of organizing the agile program management posts. It won’t be the last of all the posts, it’s just the last in the series of organizing posts. If I’d realized how many words I was writing in each post I’m not sure I would have started the series. Yes,
I have an article up on TechTarget, called Alternative project management styles are faster than multitasking. I had originally called the article “Multitasking makes you stupid-you have alternatives.” 🙂 There’s my Queen of the Career-limiting conversation thing going again. Would you have read the article with the original title? Eh, maybe not. In any case,
Many years ago, I started a job as a contract manager, and it became clear I had a big problem. I had developers who knew one area of the code well. I had testers who knew not much of any area of the code well, even though they had worked for the organization for many
“Sally, I need you to stop testing on this project and move over to Dan’s project.” “Are you serious, Ben? I just got here a month ago. I just started to learn what’s going on. I finally have the trust of the team. I haven’t worked with these guys before. I found a nice, juicy
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
I am still making progress, although it’s more difficult to see my progress today. Why? Because I did not get as much to done. One of my readers asked a question about the Urgent queue and the relative ranking of my ever-growing left hand column. How did I determine what to do, and what was