*The following is written by guest blogger Tammy Ziemba Agile development is based upon a value system and specific core practices, that when reliably connected, result in high performing software development organizations. Build up Wildly Important Goals: A team can concentrate on 1-3 things at any given […]
Projects fail for several reasons and those reasons often vary depending on who you ask. My own opinion, you can track back just about every single failure reason to issues with planning or issues with communication; sometimes both. That is, of course, assuming you have adequate support from […]
Quite simply, Osmotic Communication is the accidental overhearing of background information that may later end up being important. The term was coined by Alistair Cockburn, one of the signers of the Agile Manifesto. “Osmotic communication means that information flows into the background hearing of members of the team, […]
If you are using Kanban within Scrum or another Agile framework, you may not need to worry much about this. The meetings used as part of those frameworks should work perfectly fine. This is more meant to be a suggested guide of meeting types if you are embracing […]
Outside of the standard name, address, and email questions for job applications, there is one fairly common question that comes up about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time in applications. It seems like a fairly pointless question. It says something along the lines of, “Tell us something that […]
Pedro Manuel Faria is the CEO of a company called In Forming, a spin-off company of Famousgadget Lda. Pedro was kind enough to let me interview him in a rather unconventional fashion, through LinkedIn messaging. Our main discussion topic was the new project management software his company was […]
Phone conferencing can be tricky to navigate. Without really seeing everyone you lack some visual clues as to when someone else may have something to add to the discussion. This can sometimes create scenarios where some people dominate the call and others are never heard from. As […]
Untrained staff, new employees, inexperienced technical resources. If you have been a project manager (predictive or adaptive) for any duration of time, you have had to work with someone who lacked some knowledge in a needed area. You have probably also had tight deadlines and not enough time […]
The Scrum Master is one of three recognized roles in Scrum. They are the servant-leader for the Scrum team, which means they serve the team by working to provide what the team needs to complete their job. This could be working to make sure they have the right […]
A joke I heard once was that in an 8 hour day, Agile has 7 hours of meetings and 1 hour of work. There can be some truth to it if you let it happen.
Agile is supposed to be strict. I am not saying miss a daily standup because you don’t feel like doing it, I am saying there are situations where letting some team members not attend would be acceptable.
The answer is yes you should hold a kick-off meeting. But why? The kick-off meeting gives everyone a chance to get together (team members, stakeholders, customers, etc.) and discuss the project. You can make sure everyone is informed of their expected role in the project It gives you […]
I get it. There are some bad employees out there. Sometimes those employees are just that way and you cannot do anything about it. Other times, you create them. Posting a want-ad like the one shown here, and maybe I am wrong, seems like a sure way to […]
The Big Five is a classification system of personality traits that many psychologists propose as being the principle traits of individual differences in personality (Carleton University, 2013). These traits may determine how an individual perceives the world and how they interact with it. While these may not be […]
You want your team to work as a unified team, but for some reason, your efforts at building a team-driven culture seem to be failing. You put up all the posters, talk about the value of teamwork in meetings, created a reward program to honor those that go […]
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