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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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James McCaffrey, Volt VTE
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Scrum: The Basics Too many software projects spend too much time and money delivering too little, too late. Projects drag on for months, either thrashing from the chaos of ever-changing requirements or rigidly rejecting legitimate changes. If they deliver at all, they deliver products with too few features and too many bugs. Customers blame developers for not meeting their commitments. Developers blame customers for not knowing what they want. Dale Emery presents the better way-Scrum-a simple approach for managing complex projects. Scrum succeeds by breaking the development process into monthly or daily-or shorter-delivery cycles. Within every monthly cycle, a Scrum team plans, develops, and delivers new features with high quality and high business value. Every day, the team reports progress and coordinates its work. Scrum builds rapid action-oriented feedback into every step, guiding the team to stay on track.
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Dale Emery, DHE
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