Leadership must recognize that momentum is lost when decisions are anti-climactic. As a leader, it is tempting to focus on the decisions as your primary responsibility – but that is only half of the problem. When decisions are not incisive, are not positive, result in no obvious actions or next steps – our responsibility is to keep the team from getting demotivated, confused, or de-focused. Continue Reading
Articles by Rich
The Way Forward
Consider this post by Seth Godin… He spends a lot of time describing the negative, which is incredibly helpful when diagnosing our current situation. But he concludes with the game changer – what happens when you do the opposite of all the bad things…
Sometimes it is so easy to see “What’s wrong” with the current picture. Everyone is a critic. It is so much harder to say what we should do instead.
George Costanza (of Seinfeld) famously decided to live by figuring out what he would normally do in any situation and do the exact opposite.
Sometimes our response, when we perceive that the status quo isn’t getting the results we want, is to be somewhat brutal in our critique of the status quo – and then for all the things we find wrong, propose the opposite…
I’m not saying that the opposite is the right thing, but sometimes just thinking through what the opposite might be is a good way to brainstorm through what options you have. Better yet, look at what others are doing (that is different from your status quo) and think about the opposite of that.
Thinking in terms of opposites is an easy way to get ideas on the table.
Smaller Bets (Story Elaboration Pushback)
It is always better to spend the least amount of (time, effort, money) to get what you want, right? If I can get a tasty meal for $10 why
would I pay $30 or $200 – for the experience of eating – that isn’t about taste. That is a different thing, isn’t it. We have different priorities for eating – being full, healthy, tasty, being served, fast service, being able to relax, a pleasant experience, being able to brag about my meal/experience. Each of these is a different reason for selecting a dining experience. Each of them is valuable to some people some times, but not all people all the time. The way we choose to spend our money to eat is not that different than the way we choose to spend our money on software capabilities; there are different reasons why we prefer one capability or a means of delivering a capability over others.
These are the principles that I use to guide my story elaboration – and thus my ability to challenge those who would ask me to do more than the minimum…Continue Reading
Packing The Box
Do you remember the last time you moved? Do you remember packing some boxes so full, that they were too heavy to lift after you were done? It happens. Especially books and vinyl records. When you are packing “regularly shaped” high density items, the volume of the box may be too large to contain the weight of the items. Or it may be that the lifters (I mean you) may not have enough momentary work capacity (strength) to carry the box.
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Team Behaviors
In my recent post on Optimum Iteration Length, I finished by saying that iteration size is not the cure for bad team behaviors, but shorter iteration size makes those behaviors more apparent.
This post is about how to counteract ineffective team behaviors, from my own experience:
There are three general diseases that have lots of different causes and lots of symptoms, but at the end of the day, they boil down to these three things:Continue Reading
Optimum Iteration Length
In recent months, I have had quite a few conversations with Agile teams, and one topic that comes up is how to decide on or why to adjust iteration length. When a team is adopting agile practices, they often ask “What is the best iteration length?”
Like everything else in software development, my answer is “That depends…” Depends on what? Depends on how your team “thinks”. Depends on how your team “plans”. Depends on how your team makes decisions. Depends on how your team writes or receives user stories.Continue Reading
Better User Stories
While I will not claim to be an expert at writing user stories, I am experienced. It is not always enough to simply follow the pattern. Like any analysis pattern, there are some things that one can do to improve their stories. Continue Reading
The Appeal of User Stories
I have been “doing” user stories for a while, years now. I have been doing them mechanically without thinking about what makes them “good”. Not that I haven’t been working to make them better with each release on every project. My user stories have consistently grown better following the INVEST pattern. What I haven’t been thinking about is “why” user stories and the process through which we create them is good.Continue Reading
Performance Management
Its compensation season in many companies. Performance evaluations are either complete or in process, managers are deciding who will get more and who will get less. It can be a sore point for some employees, especially if their evaluation comes as a surprise. Its worse, when the employee does not have a way to fix it, or cannot understand what is required. Which gets to the basis of performance management – how does the manager add value to the performance of their staff?
Performance Management is Not…
…just filling out the review document and deciding who to reward and who not to reward. That is the least important part, and often the only part that a manager gets graded on. I have friends who work as managers for companies where performance management is boiled down to simply discriminating numerically between high performing and low performing staff members on their annual evaluation.Continue Reading
Speed and Friction
In a recent news story, Paul Walker, famously of the “Fast and Furious” movie series died in a car crash when he and a friend wrapped a Porsche GT3 around a tree. According to reports, they were going too fast for the condition of the car when they lost traction and spun off the roadway. The Porsche GT3 is a highly capable sports car, capable of speeds exceeding 180 mph. It is a descendant of the famous Porsche 911 which shares a rear engine, rear drive configuration with the lowly Volkswagen Beetle. Continue Reading