“Mad, Relentless, Scary, Fun” is how my programme director – Stuart Mays – described the initiative we’ve been running at at Global Media and Entertainment.
Continue reading
Tag Archives: programme management
Programmes are above Projects on the Value Ladder
The Value Ladder highlights how a supplier contributes to the success of the customer. The way I see it programmes and projects can be mapped onto the Value Ladder.
Continue reading
Continuous Delivery by Default; Timeboxes by Exception
Once I used timeboxes by default. Now I relegate Sprints and such like to exception situations.
Continue reading
Programmes can use more than one method: Kanban, Scrum, XP, BDD, etc
I have my preferences – Kanban and BDD – but don’t enforce these on my teams. That means I’ve got a couple of Scrum (ish) teams and teams that don’t use BDD. And I also have a bunch of people working in isolation – I just leave them to it.
Continue reading
35 person-years worth of prototype is a fantastic spec
I once invested 35 person-years worth of effort on prototyping. From my perspective this was time and money well invested. By the end of that time we knew, really knew, what problems our customers were facing and how to solve them.
Continue reading
Deming wasn’t a fan of Management by Walking Around
W. Edwards Deming, credited with launching the Total Quality Management movement, wasn’t a fan of Management by Walking Around.
Continue reading
How to get Agile experience as a project manager? Just start
Tim felt in a Catch-22 situation. He wanted to break into Agile, however, without experience he had little chance of landing a job running an Agile project. He felt stuck and wanted help to find a way forward. My advice – just start.
Continue reading
Little’s Law – the basis of Lean and Kanban
Sometimes I think it helps to go back to basics. And when using Lean Software Development, including Kanban, that means a man called Little and his Law. “Little’s Law” is a fundamental of queue theory and defines the relationship between Work in Progress (WIP), Throughput and Lead Time. It is the reason why Kanban teams try to limit WIP.
Continue reading
I hate part time assignments to projects; they challenge WIP limits
I hate part time assignments – when I see people being asked to split their time across projects. Where ever possible I try to get people full time on one thing at a time.
Continue reading
I always work with a “Product Owner”; never a “Scrum Product Owner”
I’ve previously had a poke at the Scrum Product Owner role when I called it Scrum’s Uber-Pig. Now I have to admit that, although I always work with a “Product Owner”, I never work with a “Scrum Product Owner”. In fact, given my own responsibilities, I can never work with a Scrum Product Owner.
Continue reading