On a recent vacation I visited the Mingei International Museum in San Diego. During a tour by the museum director we were looking at a mid-1930′s Santo Domingo Pueblo (New Mexico) necklace. “Interesting about this necklace,” the director said, “are the ‘nots’– not coral, not obsidian (but old melted phonograph records for the black element). [...]
One of the big problems with successfully executing projects is that while we know projects are very different from each other, we often manage them and measure their success in the same way. Think for a moment about the oft quoted Standish reports in which project success is measured on the traditional iron triangle basis [...]
Features or Quality? It’s always been difficult getting business partners (from executives to product owners) interested in quality—be that code quality, design quality, automated testing, or technical debt. Software technical excellence numbers (ah, if we just had good numbers) don’t mean much to business partners. Recently I’ve been adding to the Agile Triangle (Value, Quality, [...]
The Agile community has long advocated self-organizing teams. However, the emphasis has been on how teams perform work, make technical decisions and the like. Most teams are still operating in the same traditional way when it comes to measuring project performance and the application of controls. If empowerment truly focuses on decentralized decisions and authority, [...]
