Archive for the ‘Agile Management’ Category
Wednesday, August 1st, 2007
I just read a recent article on PMHut called “Schedule Questions: Pair Programming and the PNR Curve“. There is much in this article that is important for agile project management… and much that should be avoided at all costs!
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Tags: Metrics, Planning
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Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
The Project Management Institute refers to three variables that can be negotiated or constrained for a given project: scope, resources and schedule. Schedule is an interesting “variable” in that we have no choice about how time flows. We can control how much scope to ask for, we can control how much money to put towards the work, but we cannot actually “buy” more time than, say, our competitors. This has important implications which deeply challenge the PMI’s PMBoK model of project management.
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Tags: Ideas, Planning, Process
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Thursday, February 22nd, 2007
Okay, this is only marginally related to agile, but I thought it was interesting nevertheless: How to Write a Detailed Strategic Plan. The main connection to Agile Work, is that you need to have a clear performance goal in mind towards which you are working. This may be a great way to clarify your thoughts about such a goal.
Tags: Business, Discipline, Learning, Metrics, Planning
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Saturday, January 27th, 2007
Something that I would have thought impossible has happened. By understanding how incredibly limited my capacity to do work is, I am getting a greater and greater sense of freedom and contentment.
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Monday, January 22nd, 2007
Last week went totally wonko for Berteig Consulting. My planning was bad, bad, bad!
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Tags: Business, Learning, Planning, Process
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Tuesday, January 16th, 2007
I’ve almost finished reading The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization
. I wanted to share a couple of paragraphs that give a great example of the idea of Generalizing Specialists that is such a key part of Agile Work. Here’s the passage:
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Monday, January 15th, 2007
This second iteration when much better than the first. I committed to an amount of work that was much closer to my real capacity, and I stayed more focused on that work. Here are the results of my demo, retrospective and planning for Iteration 3 which I am calling “Automation” for reasons which will be described below.
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Monday, January 8th, 2007
I’ve completed my iteration planning for my second iteration. As a reminder, I’m doing this because I want to be working only 50 hours per week by July 2007. My sole improvement item from last iteration was to use get better at committing to an amount of work within my capacity. Here’s what I have planned:
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Monday, January 8th, 2007
My first iteration using Agile Work for my business development has come to a close. Here is what I did for a “demo” and retrospective.
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Tags: Business, Discipline, Learning, Metrics, Planning, Process, Work
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Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007
Wednesday is nearly done and I’m looking at my list of tasks and cringing! I’ve only done a few out of the forty for this week. What’s going on?!
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Tags: Business, Discipline, Learning, Planning, Work
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Friday, December 22nd, 2006
Last night I was thinking more about the analogy of technical debt. In this analogy, design and quality flaws in a team’s work become a “debt” that must eventually be paid back. This analogy is fantastic because it can be taken just a little bit further to understand just how bad defects are…
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Tags: Discipline, Ethics, Ideas, Metrics, Process
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Friday, November 24th, 2006
Given the huge interest in the article by Dmitri Zimine about context switching, and despite a couple of good articles about how to determine iteration length, there has been no empirical method described, only reasoning processes. This article describes a simple method to quickly determine iteration length by experimental means.
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Tags: Coaching, Discipline, Ideas, Learning, Process, Teams
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Wednesday, November 15th, 2006
Recently, Dimitri Zimine wrote an excellent little story about context switching. Joel Spolsky writes in “From the ‘You Call this Agile’ Department“:
Dmitri is only looking at one side of the cost/benefit equation. He’s laid out a very convincing argument why Sarah should not interrupt her carefully planned two week iteration, but he hasn’t even mentioned arguments for the other side: the important sale that will be lost.
Okay… I’ll bite.
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Tags: Business, Coaching, Culture, Discipline, Ideas, Interesting, Learning, Metrics, Philosophy, Process, Teams
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Tuesday, November 14th, 2006
I have now trained over one hundred people in my Agile Project Managmenet / ScrumMaster Certification course. I’m starting to see and hear some of the results of this training. There are a couple specific “smells” that I have become aware of.
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Tags: Coaching, Culture, Ideas, Learning, Mentoring, Process, Teams
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Sunday, November 12th, 2006
One problem with having multiple teams working on the same project will be the tendency to compare the teams’ performance. Why is this a problem?
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Tags: agile, architecture, multiple teams, performance evaluation, scaling scrum
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