In this post Glen Alleman retorts the commonly lauded platitude that: “There is no way to prove that the requirements we have are complete and correct until we have working code.” And as Glen is a very smart guy, from the perspective of the domains within which Glen most frequently works and thinks, his perspective…
IT Staffing Strategy Considerations
What are the elements of a staffing strategy? What are the the things to consider when developing a staffing strategy? These are the questions I want to address in this post. Division of work: What is that taxonomy into which you divide the work into that helps you decide how to staff? Often IT organizations…
Staff Forecasting for Software Delivery
One thing that IT managers – and many managers whose work consists of projects struggle with is staff forecasting. Project work can often require elastic staff scalability. I have more projects, or bigger projects, or tighter deadlines therefore I need to increase staff (elasticity) to a larger size to complete them on schedule. As a…
Six Things I Have Learned About Staffing Software Development Teams
This is a collection of observations about things that managers and leaders of software teams encounter or trip over. This post comes out of a series I am doing about IT Staffing Strategy, but these are localized to the software team, not the larger strategy picture. These are very similar to Johanna Rothman’s excellent Management…
IT Staffing Strategy Principles
Posting about staffing strategy. I think that staffing strategy applies at any level of the organization chart, and there are some basic principles that are universal and intuitive. I think that in Information Technology we sometimes lose sight of those basic principles, and skew our staffing strategy or worse, don’t understand or misapply the principles.
The Right Position for Product Organizations
What is the purpose of a product organization? Thinking generally, it is to increase the value of a product “in the eyes” of the customers, consumers, or users of the product. It doesn’t matter whether the product is toilet paper or software. The product manager has decision rights over what the product will become. The…
IT Staffing Strategy Terminology
I am thinking about IT staffing strategy. In order to share my thoughts, I need to define some aspects of that strategy, and perhaps explain why I think they are important. I am not an OD guy, nor do I play one on TV. I have, however, observed and participated in management and leadership in…
Put the Yak on the Stack
In a prior post, I introduced the concept of Yak Shaving. In this brief post, I want to introduce a strategy for preventing Yak Shaving. The developers on this team have become sensitized to yak shaving, and often report that they ran into a yak on the way to done. They have to make a…
What are you leading?
Differences Between Classes of Leadership What are the essential differences between the act of leading an initiative and the act of leading a staff, a team, or an organization. Hypothesis: the differences center around the goal against which that leadership is expressed.
Re-engineering: the Path to Complete
In a recent estimation exercise with a software delivery team, I cast the following assumption: “No classes that were not directly impacted by the story being estimated would be re-engineered.” This is an important assumption, for this team, because they tend toward boy scouting. They always want to leave the code base (camp site) better…