Today I chatted with yet another person who works for a company that is moving to resource pools: Technical people fill out an inventory of their technical skills and become part of a “resource pool,” made up of all the people in the organization who are...
I’m at Ken Schwaber’s ScrumMaster class in Denver.Yesterday we when through the start of a little project, including meetings with the customer to understand his priorities and desires for the software. We were advised on the importance of avoiding jargon,...
I was at the SD Best Practices conference earlier this week, both speaking and sitting in on sessions.One session I attended cited data on the average time spent on-task — working directly on a task that shows up on the project plan. The average task time across...
Johanna Rothman points to demotivators — a take off on those vapid posters that extol the virtues of TEAMWORK & QUALITY.I suspect that some people actually believe that putting up posters that say “Teamwork” will engender teamwork. It’s...
I used to work for a big corporation. (Now I work for a small corporation, a corporation of one.)Every so often, Management at the big corporation would notice that there was a little problem in the area of morale: people leaving in droves, few applicants, failing...
I’ve been building a new working relationship the last couple of months, or at least a new sort of working relationship. I’ve known Diana Larsen for a few years, and we’ve worked on the annual Retrospective Facilitators Gathering. For the Retro...
I was talking the other day to a friend of mine, Tom, who was promoted into management last year. Tom’s story is not unusual. In fact it’s quite common.Tom was the top technical contributor in his group– he had the deepest knowledge, best skills, and...
Tim Bacon offers this list of questions for XP coaches:Reflecting: “So if I understand correctly then what you’re saying is…”Prompting: “Have you considered [doing] / [thinking about]…”Positing: “What if [this were true]...
Ned Batchelder sent me a link to his post, Engineers are People. I really like the way he compares emotions and hunger. Emotions are like hungerImagine workers weren’t allowed to eat lunch or snack during the day, and hunger was considered a weakness that should...
Johanna Rothman writes about the importance of a written job offer on her Hiring blog. Yes, get the offer in writing. And pay attention to how the offer process goes. A friend of my recently went through a protracted process where the hiring manager would offer, then...
