I got a call from an acquaintance, Gloria, who is trying to convince her organization to adopt agile methods. “I’ve given them every logical argument I can think of,” she said. “They just don’t get it. All I get is blank looks. How stupid...
I talked to an middle manager recently who promised his VP that his group would deliver a special project for the VP.Unfortunately, he made a promise on the basis of incomplete information. Once he talked to his group and ran the numbers, it turned out the work he...
I’ve been watching a discussion on the Agile Project Management yahoo group, which poses the question, “Does everyone in agile need to be above average?”The question behind the question is, “Does agile need extremely competent people in order...
If you’ve been holding iteration retrospectives for a while, you know that timelines get old after a while. But when team skip the data part, each person works from his own data (which other people may not know) and his own interpretations (which other people...
Back in February, I wrote a post on helping people change and pointed to George Dinwiddie’s post on Overcoming Resistance. His post has grown up to be an article, and it’s posted on the AYE Conference website.
When I talk to teams about self-organizing, people worry about what to do when some one on the team isn’t working out. If we’re a team, they posit, we have to work things out so we can work together. Not necessarily so. Teams need to manage team membership...
Last week, I wrote a post about decisions that look only at easy-to-count costs and ignore hard-to-count benefits.Here’s one method for estimating hard-to-count benefits, subjective impact analysis:1. Identify the proposed course of action.2. Determine what’s...
Every so often, I share my views on pay-for-performance and annual performance appraisals on this blog. My experience is that pay-for-performance and annual performance appraisals–contrary to popular belief–actually hurt performance and results, rather...
