Agile product leaders (product managers, product owners, and business analysts) all have one goal: How do I support the team in their quest to deliver better and faster? Product leaders do this by helping the team plan with minimums, and continually replan. These two workshops help you do that. I offer two versions: for teams, […]
There’s a twitter discussion of what people “should” do in certain situations. One of the participants believes that people “should” want to learn on their own time and work more than 40 hours per week. I believe in learning. I don’t believe in expecting people to work more than 40 hours/week. My experience is that
Some of you would like to know how to answer questions about the metrics you can gather and discuss when you look for a job as a project or program manager. Here are some tips: Tip 1: Separate the quantitative questions from the qualitative questions. I bet you have qualitative “measures” that you use either
I have a post on this site, Interview Questions for Program Managers. There are a number of comments. Some ask how to answer the questions. Some want more information. Maybe you also read Six Tips for Answering Project and Program Manager Interview Questions or Interview Questions for Project Managers and want more detail. This is the detail. If
Hiring managers who haven’t read Hiring Geeks That Fit are now asking another irrelevant question: Tell me something no one else knows about you. Now, in case you aren’t sure, this is an irrelevant question. It doesn’t directly help an interviewer learn how the candidate can perform the work or fit with the team. It doesn’t
As I write the program management book, I am struck by how difficult it is to estimate large chunks of work. In Predicting the Unpredictable and Manage It!, I recommend several approaches to estimation, each of which includes showing that there is no one absolute date for a project or a program. What can you do?
In the blogosphere and in the press, there is an increasing notice about the lack of women in technical fields and management positions. Here is some data: Why women leave tech: what the research says by Sue Gardner. Read Visualizing Silicon Valley’s Lack of Diversity. Notice that tech is overwhelmingly white and male. It does
Do You Have an Abundance or Scarcity Mindset? Have you met people at work who believe in zero-sum games, with one winner and one loser? “You must do my project. I don’t care about anyone else.” That you-against-me is an indication of a scarcity mindset. Some people believe in the abundance mindset where, together, we create
If you read my Three Alternatives to Making Smaller Stories, you noticed one thing. In each of these examples, the problem was in the teams’ ability to show progress and create interim steps. But, what about when you have a “wicked” problem, when you don’t know if you can create the answer? If you are
When I was in Israel a couple of weeks ago teaching workshops, one of the big problems people had was large stories. Why was this a problem? If your stories are large, you can’t show progress, and more importantly, you can’t change. For me, the point of agile is the transparency—hey, look at what we’ve