Tag: project management
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North Star
Successful companies usually have a secret sauce. It could be an algorithm or an insight. But whatever that secret sauce is, it is used to create or disrupt a market. Apple created the PC market when Steve and Steve figured out that affordable pre-built personal computers would be really useful for consumers. IBM disrupted the…
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Telling Time as an Engineer
Time is the most precious resource. It’s in limited supply, once spent we can’t get it back, and you can’t trade it directly. This might sound a little radical but most global, national, business, and personal problems, seem to me, to boil down to problem of time and who’s time is more important than yours.…
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The Three Laws of Agile Process
As early as 2007 Agile practitioners, or at least people who blog about Agile, began to observe that we live in a post-agile world. I’m not sure what means but Agile is a conversation about the best way to manage the software development process that has been going on for a long time. Has it…
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Volunteer Scrum Master Handbook
I have to disclose upfront that I am more of an Agile guy than a Scrum guy. Which is to say I feel more at home discussing Agile in general than Scrum in particular. (I’m not even sure how to capitalize it–SCRUM or scrum?) Over the years I’ve made my peace with Scrum and as…
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Agile Fables
I love a good fable. The kind that Aesop used to write with animals acting out human morality tales. Of course, if you do the research, you quickly find out that Aesop didn’t write most (if any of the fables) we ascribe to him and like Shakespeare he probably never existed. I don’t let reality…
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Managing the De-Motivated
It still amazes me how a process created by engineers for engineers can make so many engineers so unhappy. I’ve seen all kinds of responses to Agile from engineers. Some are immediately enthusiastic. Others are cautiously optimistic. Many are amused and cynical. And some are down right hostile. Over time the responses polarize and the…
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Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
What can we learn from Dr. Peter Venkman about the Agile development process? It’s true that Venkman was the less technical member of his team. Clearly Dr. Egon Spengler was the blue-sky researcher while Dr. Ray Stantz was the practical engineer. But Venkman brought a lot to the table: Charm, business acumen, and the…
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Improving Your Whuffie with Agile
Virtual currency like Cory Doctorow’s concept of Whuffie will probably replace real money in the next 100 years. Maybe sooner with the way our current economic crisis is going. Once all the hard currency in the world is spent it’s Gresham’s law FTW! You can get a head start by using Agile development principles to…
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The Shorter Timescale
I’m reading a very scary book right now: Heidegger and a Hippo Walk Through Those Pearly Gates. It’s a funny and informative look at how philosophers and religious thinkers deal with death. I don’t want to be a spoiler but the basic message of the book is that most people live in denial of their…
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True Working-ness
Last week I presented to my team at Lime Wire Agile and Scrum in all it’s most excellent glory. Jason Herskowitz, Lime Wire’s VP of Product Management, and I ran though all the major Agile elements and vocabulary words. The best part of the presentation was questions asked by developers, testers, system admins, product managers,…