Julian Elve points to an article on How to be Happy in his post on Positive Psychology.Now there’s something worth knowing :-)Also see Keith Ray’s post on the Paradox of Happiness.I’m reminded of one of the sayings of Virginia Satir: “The...
My mother used to say that to me when I was a child and didn’t exhibit sufficient independence of thought. I was reminded of that (annoying) phrase recently at a talk I gave on influence and managing your boss.My premise is that influence depends on:1) having a...
I’ve come across a couple of references lately that state that aglile methods won’t scale because they are people-centric — they rely on highly-skilled, people who are capable of working together to produce software.When has this not been true? Any...
I believe that great managers are made, not born. And there are some minimum qualifications to become a great manager. A while back I wrote about one of them, the ability to delegate and trust people to achieve results.The other entry criteria is liking to work with...
I walk through a variation on this statement (originally from Norm Kerth) at the beginning of a retrospective:The Retrospective Prime DirectiveRegardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he/she could, given what...
I came across this list of guidelines for learning on Jason Kottke’s site (via Ned Batchelder).Post script: Dale Emery points out that this list is remarkably similar to David Bohms work on Dialogue, which has been made popular by Peter Senge and others....
When I work with a project team on a retrospective, one of the first things I attend to is the safety of the group. I define safety as the ability to speak your truth without fear of ridicule, rejection, or retribution. Once in a while, someone has a strong reaction...
Yep, that’s me. One of the key ideas in Tom De Marco’s book Slack is that people need a little slack in their schedules to reinvent and change. Humans who are busy all the time don’t have the time/ability to reflect and create new hypotheses on how...
Dave Hoover has an interesting post on where to look for the source of errors, Assume it is Your Fault.I was fortunate to learn this lesson on my first programming job (very very long ago). We didn’t have a separate test group, so we tested each others code. I...
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...
Tim Bacon cites another cause of monoculture: Monoculture emerges very quickly in software development teams that impose a ‘standard’ IDE and OS, that use a predictive (not adaptive) lifecycle process, or where developers are expected to work the same...
