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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.…