OK – so everyone should know that I am “the old one”. I have a couple recommendations for books now out of print that were business oriented, but that I frequently hear blog advice that reminds me of things that I learned 20+ years ago in these books. Today Seth Goding posted Expanding the Circle…
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Pragmatically Agile
In a conversation recently, I was reminded how being agile is awfully like being pragmatic. We were talking about topics of interest to project managers like estimation and forecasting and measurement. One of the topics discussed was about grooming the backlog, and backlog sequencing strategies: Walking Skeleton vs. feature by feature? Do you build just…
Inaugural Curation Post…
This week I am making good on my intent to post some of what I’ve been reading and found valuable. agile42 | Feature Injection Applied to Service Delivery I spent a bit of time reading about Feature Injection as a different way (than other agile processes) at dealing with requirements. I really am intrigued, and…
Emergent Vs. Inverted Thinking
In agile communities developers, project managers, testers, there is a phobia or paranoia about big ANYTHING up front – that is we should not spend more energy up front than is absolutely needed to get the committed stories/features done in the next iteration. The concept that we use is emergent thinking. Requirements emerge as we…
What is up with This (Blog)?
So I want to talk a bit about this blog and how I have been doing it and something that has changed the way I will blog in the future… **Personal Stuff** Most of the posts on this blog have been born out of my own experience – both good and bad. This blog is…
Competency Vs. Excellence
We can train people to be competent, but excellence is a result of an individual being given the freedom to make mistakes, to learn, and truly incented to grow without fear of retribution – not without accountability but without loss of reputation. Excellence develops when an individual recognizes his own adequacies and inadequacies, and is…
Product Owner Excellence
What makes a product owner excellent? Is it subject matter or domain knowledge? Is it discipline around following the rules of the delivery management practice? Is it ability to elicit value propositions from or to sell value propositions to stakeholders? In my last post ProductOwnerTraining – I listed out a set of core activities that…
Product Owner Training
How do you develop the mindset and skills needed to be a successful software product owner? In a technology organization, (software vendor, tech startup) product owners tend to come out of a technology background. They are ex-developers, ex-architects and sometimes ex-sales engineers. In a non-technology enterprise (a normal company) the product owner is more likely…
A Definition of Done
In his Herding Cats blog, Glen Alleman, asks a very pertinent question. What is the definition of done? Well? Done (Enterprise software delivery project) – when software capabilities have been delivered that support the business value proposition per the customer’s business capability requirements. In our agility, we recognize that requirements are clarified by “emerging information”.…
Enough (as a damping mechanism)
In a recent post, Esther Derby describes a tendency of organizations towards oscillating between centralized or decentralized controls – I thought it was a brilliant insight in that she exposed that at the extreme reaches of the pendulum in either direction, there are evidence of lower performance, but for different causes. I have experienced this…