I’m a member of a panel Jul 23 for the Boston Agile Bazaar meeting, and am attempting to articulate my two-minute position statement to the question: How would you characterize your approach to handling people problems on agile teams? My problem is that I don’t do anything any differently for agile or non-agile teams. I […]
In Knowledge Management Needs to be Agile, Too, I said If you put people in competition with each other *in any way*, they will have dis-incentives to share their knowledge. John, in his comment on that post, said it seemed intuitive, but was having trouble articulating why. I’m here to help 🙂 Some of my
John Cook wrote a blog post, Scaling the number of projects, that starts addressing the issue of why it’s everyone’s job to manage their own project portfolios. Here’s an example of the problem he’s noticed: It sounds easy to manage independent projects: if the projects are for different clients and they have different developers, just
Some folks have told me in their agile projects that they are able to deal with technical debt as they find it. They are a lucky few. But more have been stumped: “I find something. I really can’t fix it now. But I don’t know what to do with it.” I’ve suggested putting it on
I was at the Better Software conference last week, met a bunch of great people (including Jim Shore and Joel Spolsky). Another important person is someone who’s not famous–and important nevertheless. A senior tester explained her situation and asked for some help. “Most of our testers can’t read code. And, we don’t know what
A new-to-a-company manager explained this situation to me recently. She’d overheard something like this recently from one of her team members. So you’re working in a place where it seems as if all the managers are Bozos. But you like the work and you like the people, and you know nothing lasts forever. After
I was a fortunate young developer. In my first three months at work, I ran into the 90% done schedule game. I did it to myself. I estimated a particular task was going to take 6 weeks. Of course, being an arrogant and naive developer, it never occurred to me to break the task
I’m not big on information hiding. I’ve always wanted to know what was going on in other parts of the company, so I could better understand how to do my job. I recently read Laurent’s post on Information Hiding, and realized that I when I recently spoke about open book management, some people didn’t understand