Time for a Decision On a recent flight, I sat next to the VP of Sales for a large multinational company. Their new big product in development needs a new pricing structure that requires agreement across the organization. Can he get a decision? No. He’s conducted conference call after conference call for months. No decision. […]
I had an email conversation with a colleague about when you let people fail versus when you rescue them—how you nurture leadership. The context is with people who are new to management, or new to a particular piece of work in a project. If you’re agile, I say you pair these people and be done
Now that the election is over, we have an opportunity to reflect on some of the project management and hiring practices. I’m going to blog here and over at Hiring Technical People because the bits are just too juicy to leave untouched. If you read nothing else, read Inside Orca: How the Romney Campaign Suppressed
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
Building or Maintaining Agility in Geographically Distributed Teams By now, with all of my tips, you have a good idea about how to start a project with your geographically distributed team. You have a project charter. You have a timezone bubble chart. That helps everyone see where people are in the world. Those two things help
One of the problems in a geographically distributed team is the dreaded email chain. Someone has a problem and sends an email. Probably late in the day, when he or she is frustrated after pounding on the problem all day, getting nowhere–except more frustrated. Sally sends the email to the project team. I take offense
It seems strange to plan for Murphy’s Law, but if you don’t plan for risks, they will happen and they will turn into disasters. Some risks you can’t plan for, but many risks you can anticipate. I plan for some typical risks: I keep a power cord in my office, in my briefcase, in my
Some agile teams build and maintain their project’s rhythm, happily developing the system. Sure, they may encounter issues–but they can manage those problems and they successfully release the product. No one works overtime, the product owner is happy and the users are happy with the system. Then there are the other teams. I meet many
Have you ever waited weeks for one piece of functionality so you could release a large project? Have you been in the situation where the software is waiting for the hardware? Or where the database admin held up the entire release because his work wasn’t coordinated with the feature-based teams? That’s because you were working
I’ve been watching, reading, and listening to the Katrina coverage over the past week. And the one thing that stands out for me is my perception that there was a lack of disaster planning. I’m not going to play the blame game–there’s plenty to go around. But here are the questions I would have