When companies adopt Agile methods, management roles shift. Team manages their own work and managers focus on system problems. The manager’s stance toward the team moves to facilitative leadership and away from hierarchical leadership. For managers who have been...
Johanna wrote about the interesting rumor I heard at the STAR conference. (It’s not true.)When people lack information, they fill in the blanks–sometimes with something titillating, and sometimes with what they wish were true.In situations of stress or...
When I talk to groups who have been using Agile methods for a while, most of them report that the development groups started with Agile.Now that Agile is becoming better known, senior managers are latching onto Agile as a solution to slow delivery, missed deadlines,...
Becoming consciously competentI’ve noticed that my blog posts have been errr… infrequent lately. You may have noticed, too.I’ve been pretty busy: writing one book, editing another, creating a new workshop… So I’ve been telling myself...
A while back, I wrote about the Interaction Model and how communication can become tangled.I’ve been working with a colleague preparing for a workshop. This morning we lived out a great example of how communication goes awry:After synching up and making a plan...
There was a big discussion last week about how open space, open source and agile methods are related. The conclusion was that comparing those three methods has limited value. Then Harrison Owen (originator of Open Space Technology) offered this perspective: …I...
I want to follow up Joshua’s comment that it’s high time we focus on the people side. What does that mean?I ran into someone who described how he had handled a “people” issue. I’ll call him Joe. Joe believes he’s adept at handling...
Joshua Kerievsky posted this update from SD West on the IXP mailing list: At an SD West agile panel this week, I was jolted by legendary guru Jerry Weinberg. He said he’d recently looked over the past 500 issues of a certain computer journal in order to count...
Alicia Yanik has a great article on her experiences implementing Scrum over on stickyminds.We had the Scrum logistics in place, but I struggled with harnessing the team’s power… Then I took a closer look and noticed the team problem solving, self-organizing, and...
Words are important. I’ve fallen into the habit of talking about “soft skills” — meaning intra/interpersonal, communication, and collaboration skills. Pretty common usage, so I’ll cut myself some slack.But I’m going to change the...
Johanna’s on a (very excellent) rant about forced ranking. I concur. Some people are convinced that forced ranking is a Good Thing. Usually they have arguments such as “everyone needs to know where they stand,” or “we need some way to weed out...
I wrote a little article (posted on stickyminds) about how our interpretation of an interaction can get us in a tangle.Sometimes we hear someone say something, and conclude that we’re being treated unfairly or we’re under attack. A friend of mine wrote to...
Via Dave Smith: Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work: 6 lessons by Evan Robinson.Evan’s 6 Lessons.Lesson One, then, is this: Productivity varies over the course of the workday, with the greatest productivity occurring in the first four to six hours. After enough...
It seems that Agile is out of the early adopter phase and people are starting to ask about how to do Agile organization wide.So I’ve been pondering change for an Agile organization.One thing I’m quite certain about is that traditional...
Brad Appleton starts his new blog with a post The first thing to build is TRUST.Agreed! If we want to deliver great software, we have to attend to building trust and relationship. The quality of interactions determines the quality of results. Here are five pragmatic...
Susan Annunzio posts on the Fast Company blog:One of the most interesting findings of the Contagious Success research is that in high-performing groups, the leader “protects” the group from the larger company, whether lobbying for more resources or...
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a fund raiser and was seated next to a person I didn’t know. I struck up a conversation, asked a few questions, and learned that the person next to me was a manager in a IT department.This week, I had lunch with another manager...
A couple of weeks ago, at the Better Software Conference in San Jose, I lead an informal session on Retrospectives. I agreed to put the notes from our session up on my blog. This is a combination of the notes and my editorial comments :-)I use a framework for...
I’ve been spending time on planes lately, and have had plenty of time to catch up on my reading. (Well, I made some progress, but I’m really not caught up.) Some of the books have been better than others and some have been quite astonishing.I was struck by...
