“Well, we just got another kicking”. A group of us, representing technology, had just attended the regular programme board meeting with the business types. In the debrief afterwards the technology folk around me were despondent. In fact they were despondent every month after this meeting. They genuinely felt kicked. But I didn’t. I never did. It was almost like I experienced a completely different meeting to that experienced by my colleagues.
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Tag Archives: programme management
Why I don’t hire Scrum Masters
I don’t hire Scrum Masters. I don’t hire Scrum Masters because the role is the wrong shape to fit into my team, with the wrong set of responsibilities, and the people who might apply have insufficient qualifications for the job I need done.
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Specialists are a Pain
Specialists are very useful. They are also a pain. It is great to have the experts around when we need them. But specialists are also add painful management overhead. I accept I have to do it but I wish I didn’t.
I’m going to look at three situations where I’ve had to deal with specialists and explain what I did:
- Drowning in specialists
- Front / Back end developers
- Part time external specialists
Headphones cut off vital information
Headphones. I hate them. If I wore headphones at work I would be cut off from a lot of vital information about what is really going. It would hamper Management on the Ground. So I never wear them.
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What to do when Estimates go up a lot
You start the Sprint confidently but the burn down chart starts going up. Things are a lot harder than expected! Your velocity is lower than you expected. What to do?
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Agile Status Report for Executives: Best, Worst, Throughput
My programme’s Sponsoring Group asked me to send a weekly status report. This was to compensate for the fact they were at a remote site and hence couldn’t see the walls of our informative workspace. They were paying the bills so who was I to argue.
Luckily they don’t want a lot of detail. They want to know three things:
- Throughput
- Best thing this week
- Worst thing this week
Six Things To Do When Agile Newbies Join Your Team
So you are up and running with Lean-Agile but your team is still growing or there is some churn in the team. Either way new people arrive, often without an effective Lean-Agile background. What to do?
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How to spot a Product Owner’s Pet Requirements
Everybody has pet requirements and product owners, being human, are no different. Unfortunately pet requirements are a real risk to software projects. We should all resist these pet requirements and do everything possible to kill them off ASAP and avoid building them. So how do you spot pet requirements
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It is ALL Number One Priority / It is ALL Must Have. Not true!
If the customer claims everything on the product backlog is top priority, and by implication must have, then you’ve a bit of an education job ahead of you. You have to get the customer to the point where only one thing is top priority and even “must haves” are sorted into a priority order. There is a good chance some of those “must haves” turn into “would like to have” and in time disappear.
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My four days of silence surrounded by developers
Developers are different from other folk. Introverted is an understatement. My four days of silence really highlighted this.
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