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 [...]
Archive | Performance & Governance RSS feed for this section
Features or Quality? Selling Software Excellence to Business Partners
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, [...]
Beyond Project Plans
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, [...]
Velocity is Killing Agility!
As I talk with companies around the world it’s clear that a significant number of them are still mired in the productivity, efficiency, and optimization mud. It’s easy to spot them because they are often maniacal about measuring velocity—team velocity, velocity across teams, rolling up velocity to an organizational level or even velocity per developer [...]
Shortening the Tail
In Agile Project Management, I wrote a short section on a performance metric called “shortening the tail.” I liked using the metric, tail length, because it is easy to calculate and tells a lot about an organization’s Agile implementation. It’s not a vanity metric, like the number of developers who have attended a refactoring seminar, [...]
“The Easier It Is To Quantify, the Less It’s Worth”
This quote from Seth Godin (Linchpin, 2010), sparked my thinking about metrics and outcomes. It parallels what I’ve quipped in presentations, “I’d rather have a fuzzy measure of something important than a precise measure of something unimportant.” In Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations (1996) Rob Austin discusses the difference between desired outcomes and performance [...]
Iterative Delivery, Waterfall Governance
As agile methods become widespread in organizations, the debate over serial, waterfall life cycles versus iterative life cycles is moving from an engineering-level to an executive-level discussion. In terms of project governance, executives are interested in two things—investment and risk. They have to answer two basic questions: What is the projected value or return on [...]
Affiliations
- APLN.org - Cofounder & Board Member
- Agile Alliance - Cofounder
