Daily Plan: Stand up to Plan the Day

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“Stand up please”. Old habits die hard and because I started Agile with Extreme Programming I “Stand up”, I don’t “Scrum”. Otherwise the two types of meeting are pretty similar. “What have you done since we last met? What will you do before we meet again? Any impediments?”

Great meeting. Wrong questions.

As Mike Cohn explained back in 2006, and Matt Wynne reminded me last year, the daily meeting is a Planning session. It is part of Mike’s planning onion because the aim of the “Stand up” is to develop the plan for the day.
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The Sign Off – An Example of Delegation and Decision Making

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I had just joined a team as programme manager and was talking to the lead user experience (UX) designer about the latest version of the UX design. We’d not worked together before and this was the first time I’d seen the designs. They looked pretty good to me and I told her so. That is when it got a bit weird.

PgM: They look great.
UX: Okay, I’ll get everybody together to get sign off on the designs.
PgM: Um, who is everybody?
UX: <Lists names of the business representative, product manager, technical architect, business sponsor, technical sponsor, UX discipline lead for the department, development manager, portfolio manager, team assistant to take notes, and quality manager>. I hope they don’t want too many changes.
PgM: <Jaw drops>

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Specification by Example versus Behaviour Driven Development

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Personally I favour the phrase “Specification by Example” over the more commonly used term “Behaviour Driven Development” (BDD). That is because I demand the specifications are by example but only encourage my developers to do outside-in test first development (from BDD).
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No walls: What to do when you’ve no Walls for your Informative Workspace

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You move into a lovely new office. Lots of light and open spaces. Beautiful. Modern. But no walls.

Agile kind of assumes you’ve got walls. Whiteboards. Sprint Plan. Product Backlog. Burn down Charts. Kanban boards. Cumulative Flow Diagrams. All prominently displayed to transform your office into an Informative Workspace.

So what do you do when there are no walls?
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Manage All Assumptions as Risks

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Assuming something means taking it for granted. In other words you’ve got a more or less conscious theory (or, less charitably, a guess) that something is going to happen. The trouble is that the assumption might not be true.

That screams risk. And as a programme manager or project manager you need to manage risk.
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