Articles

Image generated by Microsoft Designer Micromanaging has gotten a bad rap that maybe it doesn’t deserve it. Consider two of the most successful technology CEOs—Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. No one had a sense of the image, brand, or product integrity like Gates or Jobs. They had insight and an esthetic sense of what image… Read More »Micromanaging the Right Way

The Iron Triangle, a 60-year old project management metric structure, continues to frustrate agile project teams. Developed in 1969 by Dr. Martin Barnes, the Iron Triangle’s three dimensions are scope, schedule, and cost. This triangle should enable project managers to adjust as conditions change. However, too often in practice, managers view the three dimension as… Read More »The ghosts of project management’s Iron Triangle still haunt agile teams.

Agility encourages “Doing Less.” Doing less can result in delivering more value, more throughput, more ROI, more creativity, and more focus. Do less low-value activity. It’s easy to think about what to put into a product. We often get suggestions from a wide variety of sources—engineers, customers, managers, executives, the janitor, and other teams. It’s… Read More »Do You Need a “not to do” list?

Discipline without freedom is tyranny; freedom without discipline is chaos (Cullen Hightower). Morning Star is one of the largest tomato processor in the United States and grows by being innovative. Its website site states they are the “Industry leader in size and innovation.” We don’t often think of the tomato processing business and innovation in… Read More »Making Self-Organization Work at a Tomato Processor*

The issue of certification has been around forever. Every so often interest spikes again as people like  Jonny Williams and Chris Stone reignite the debate (in LinkedIn).  Software engineering in the 1980s aspired to be considered “Professional,” equivalent to the status given accountants (CPA), other Professional Engineers (PE), or lawyers. In the 1990s the big… Read More »Certification: It makes money, but does it make sense?

🏰How is Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, first staged in 1597, relevant today? What possible linkage could there possibly be between Romeo and a delivery manager? Romeo’s role requires actors to read lines, move about on stage, and engage with the audience. Leonardo DiCaprio was praised for his 1996 movie version, while Leslie Howard’s portrayal in… Read More »Romeo, a delivery manager? ❤️

❓Does your management insist on mission impossible delivery schedules? Want to develop software really fast? How about one minute? This methodology incorporates such exciting concepts as total data independence (the output has nothing to do with the input); the notion that management is not interested in information, only in being happy; and a one-minute life… Read More »⚡️The One-Minute Methodology

Southwest Airlines’ recent holiday fiasco shed light into a dark corner of Information Technology. Consider the analogy of a car whose owner only added gas—no maintenance. After a time rust would appear and spread, tires would go slick, engine oil would become sludge, the air conditioning would stop working, and the pattern would intensify and… Read More »Technical Debt is Rust you can’t see

After 20+ years of growing influence, Agile appears to be standing on the precipice of irrelevance.   In this time, Agile has spread wider than we Manifesto authors dreamed, but failed to spread as deeply as needed. Agile has lived up to Jerry Weinberg’s Law of Strawberry Jam, “As long as it has lumps, you… Read More »Agile on the Precipice

“Writing is a form of thinking, whatever the subject,” says William Zinsser in his book, Writing to Learn. Agile methods are driven by feedback and learning practices and so it’s important to understand how learning to write well is critical to learning well. The entire results of software projects are writings. Whether the output is… Read More »Writing To Learn