People & Teams

Articles

Old Habits Die Hard

It’s easy to develop habits in one environment that don’t translate to a new environment. Here are some tips to keep old habits from holding you back.

Dawn Code's picture Dawn Code
A Tale of Two Product Owners

The product owner role on agile projects is critical to the team and the project. The product owner's influence, performance, and behavior can set the stage for smooth sailing—or sink a project. In this article, Anupam Kundu shares two different product owner experiences to drive home the argument how their behaviors and practices can shape organizational culture—specifically for new product development and start-ups.

Anupam Kundu
Weekend Testing Comes to the Americas

Inspired by the success of India’s Weekend Testing movement, Michael Larsen saw a need for a group closer to home. The Weekend Testing Americas chapter invites testers from across the Western Hemisphere to join an informal, distributed group of their tester peers to learn and perfect their craft.

Michael Larsen's picture Michael Larsen
Reducing Surprise: Another Feature of Good Project Management

The portions of projects that are not yet complete occur in the future. Since the future is an uncertain place, there will always be surprises. Some surprises are so obvious that they should hardly be called surprises at all. This is the kind of surprise that project management helps to avoid.

Payson Hall's picture Payson Hall
I’ve Got Your Back

Having similar motivations and processes may help to establish a team, but you and your coworkers won’t be the best teammates you can be until you also have each other’s back. Here, Johanna Rothman and Gil Broza describe valuable approaches to whole-team support, including banking trust and building shared responsibility.

Johanna Rothman's picture Johanna Rothman Gil Broza
Dealing with Troublesome People

Have you ever had to contend with a demanding developer? A testy tester? A cantankerous customer? Why oh why do people act that way? Rather than wondering why they act that way, it can be helpful to consider the circumstances that might account for their behavior.

Naomi Karten's picture Naomi Karten
working together Harvesting Stakeholder Perspectives to Organize Your Backlog

When Mary Gorman and Ellen Gottesdiener facilitated a game called The Backlog Is in the Eye of the Beholder for the Boston chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis, both the players and the facilitators learned some important lessons in organizing a project requirements backlog. In this article, they describe the game and what it revealed, including the value of truly knowing your stakeholders.

A Psychology Framework That Will Help You Implement CM Practices

How does personality impact the implementation of industry Standards and Frameworks? It would seem that following the guidance in the IEEE 828 CM Planning standard is simply a matter of writing CM Plans and documenting your existing CM practices. The fact is that some people implement Standards and Frameworks successfully and others fail miserably. This article presents a popular and highly regarded psychology framework that will help you better understand how to implement Configuration Management.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
The Shape of Change on Agile Teams

Many times, Scrum Masters and agile coaches are confronted with the need to change a team that seems to be stuck in its own behavior. And though team members may be willing to change, they just can’t seem to get out of their current situation. The author sheds a new light on this difficult problem and proposes to change the environment instead of the team.

Jurgen Appelo's picture Jurgen Appelo
Thoughts from Mid-Project

My team is in the middle of one of the hardest projects—we call them "themes"—we’ve ever tackled. We’re a high-functioning agile team that has helped our company grow and succeed over several years now—we “went agile” in 2003. Here’s one thing I know for sure: No matter how many problems you solve, new challenges will pop up.

Lisa Crispin's picture Lisa Crispin

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