Articles

Are You Leading a Tribe?

In today's organizations, everyone is expected to lead. If you've been waiting for a leadership role to come to you, it might be time to step up and seek out your opportunity to be a leader. Look around you: Self-proclaimed leaders are receiving interesting projects, building enviable careers, and being promoted. In this article, we'll take a look at how Seth Godin's book Tribes can provide a useful framework for leading from the ground up.
Laura Brandenburg's picture Laura Brandenburg
April 18, 2011
What Are You Doing?

Your issue-tracking and version-management systems are powerful tools that you can use to help you manage change and improve team and individual productivity. This article provides some simple advice on how to use your tracking system to be more productive without introducing excessive overhead.
Steve Berczuk's picture Steve Berczuk
March 14, 2011
No Group Is a Team on Day One

Assembling a group of people and declaring them a team doesn’t make them one. Do you have the conditions necessary for the team to form? What activities have they completed to help them find an identity, their purpose, and how they’ll interact with each other?
Don Gray's picture Don Gray
March 9, 2011
How to Make People Feel (Un)Welcome

The age-old expression "you never get a second chance to make a first impression" is still true to this day. So often the way we greet people, or fail to greet them, sets an irreversible path of leaving others feel completely unwelcome, even if that wasn't the intention.
Naomi Karten's picture Naomi Karten
March 2, 2011
Test-Driven Design for the Project Manager

Many developers and testers are familiar with test-driven design (TDD), but how can managers use it to drive project implementation? In this article, John Goodpasture offers a guide to TDD design from the project manager’s perspective.
John C. Goodpasture's picture John C. Goodpasture
March 1, 2011
Filling The Blank Page

Having trouble starting projects, understanding scope and business processes, or with estimation? Mark shares some tips and techniques to avoid common business analysis pain points at the early part of a new project assignment.
Mark Jenkins's picture Mark Jenkins
February 28, 2011
Mixing Roles in Scrum

We put a lot of emphasis on being Renaissance workers, able to step comfortably from one job role to the next. But, as Mitch Lacey describes here, not all roles play nicely with each other, and trying to combine them may lead to disaster.
Mitch Lacey's picture Mitch Lacey
February 22, 2011
Building a Competitive Software Capability: Creative Destruction

In this excerpt from Leadership, Teamwork, and Trust: Building a Competitive Software Capability, Watts Humphrey and James Over explain why these changes must be a high priority for software companies and other organizations for whom knowledge is a valuable asset.
Watts S. Humphrey James W. Over
February 22, 2011
Effective Leadership Communication

In most workplaces, there’s an institutional hierarchy that may influence how we react in situations that require us to step up. Navigating effective communication means knowing when we should listen quietly to leaders and when we should challenge or question.
Payson Hall's picture Payson Hall
February 15, 2011
Risk Identification, Analysis, and Mitigation in Agile Environments

Although risk identification, analysis, and mitigation are critically important parts of any software project effort, agile projects require non-traditional techniques that are much quicker and easier to use than classical risk techniques. James McCaffrey focuses-not on theory-but on realistic risk analysis methods agile teams can readily implement with lightweight tools. James explains and demonstrates how you can employ taxonomy and storyboarding methods to recognize project meta-risks and identify product risks throughout the development lifecycle. Using “central moment” and “PERIL” techniques, you'll learn to analyze these risks and develop management and mitigation strategies dynamically, while the project is underway.
James McCaffrey, Volt VTE

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