Three Tips to Move from Agile in Name Only to Real Agility Several of you have written to me, asking about the problems you see. Your managers focus on certifications, practices, and vanity metrics—not real agility. The managers don’t understand how agility can help them. You see cargo cult agile. You worry that agility is […]
Many organizations heeded the COVID-19 warnings and sent people home to work as remote teams. The managers want to proceed as if the people can work from home and have “business as usual.” They’ve made these requests to their staff: Work at home, as if you were at the office. (Keep the same hours and
What Happened to the Beautiful Plans? (They Became Experiments) Tim, a senior manager, loved seeing plans for work and roadmaps. Then, the organization decided to Embrace, Not Manage Change. Tim wasn’t sure how to track the work. This image helps me frame the need for an agile approach. (See the blog series: Where I Think “Agile” is
Dan, a product owner felt as if he was stuck between the proverbial rock and the hard place. His managers wanted “everything” in the next release.He knew the team couldn’t possibly deliver all of it. He hoped to get most of the features. He met with Polly, the agile project manager, and asked how much
Create Successful Schedules: Three Tips to Rolling Wave Planning Do you ever feel under pressure to finish “all” of whatever this project is? And, the project might unfold in various ways, so you can’t quite plan “all” of it? Enter rolling-wave planning. You don’t have to know everything. You only have to know where you
Knowledge, Risks, and Guarantees One senior manager in an organization trying to use agile told me about his problems, “We still need to know when the project will be done. We can’t afford the risk of missing the deadline. When we spent all that time on requirements, the team knew what they were doing. We
Emergent Projects: Managing the Unpredictable Are you planning a change project, managing your way through a job search, or some other not-totally-deterministic project? Wouldn’t it be nice if life went according to plan? You could create a roadmap first, estimate how long things would take to get done, create a project plan, and do them.
Workshop Objective: If you’re dreading the next project—because you know it will be a disaster, or at the very least uncomfortable—it’s time to think about designing your next project. We’re accustomed to thinking about designing products or tests, but projects? Is it really possible to design a project? Yes. Lifecycles, those idealized approaches to organizing
Don has a great post on Single Point Requirements. You get one example of the requirements: “This product needs to do this. Just this.” Sure enough some months (or years) later, that single example is not sufficiently general to do everything you want the product to do. That’s ok, as long as you plan to