Decision making should be approached just like a software project: You have to map out what you want and how you're going to get it. Payson Hall tells the story of a team that set out to find the perfect product—without an official plan. Learn how to avoid the mistakes they made.

Traditional management systems were designed to measure conformance to plan, not adaptability. So in order to achieve truly agile, innovative organizations, a change in our approach to performance management systems is necessary. Find out why a switch to an adaptive performance management system can unleash the full potential of agile methods.

Just because a metric is easy to capture doesn't mean it is useful. The metrics that are really needed are the ones that can help you make good decisions. Find out how to establish a project dashboard with meaningful metrics that will guide your project safely to its destination without getting bogged down in an endless pursuit of unnecessary information.

The responsibility for building effective software teams is more than just a management task. Indeed, in some situations, management could easily rationalize that there is limited business value in improving team effectiveness. Our current reliance on processes, methodologies, and tools is misguided in that it largely looks outward rather than inward for solutions. There is a better way! Jim Brosseau examines the challenges and barriers we face with typical approaches when attempting to build effective teams. He explains how each of us can take responsibility for personal and team success and describes a meaningful progression of steps to achieve this goal. In doing so, Jim helps you look beyond the traditional team building approaches to explore personal motives, attitudes, skills, and interpersonal relationships-all fair game as potential opportunities for improvement.