Leadership
As a leader, you know the addage, "Your people will do 100% of what you do wrong, and 50% of what you do right."
With this in mind, a leader looks for ways to demonstrate correct action for their them to emulate.
William Pietri over at Agile Focus has written an interesting article entitled, "Agile’s Second Chasm (and how we fell in)" in which he talks about how agile development has fallen into a common trap where large companies are now spending a lot of money hiring agile (Scrum) consultants just so that they can say they are agile, but all the while avoiding any change that is required by Scrum. It echoes the questions that I've been asking for a while, "Can a fortune 500 company actually do agile development?"...
There's an interesting discussion going on over on the Scrum Development list, dealing with technical stories verses user stories. The idea is that "Improve our continuous integration server" may not directly translate to visible functionality for a customer, so how do you handle this in Scrum. It's a conversation that pops up regularly and there are a couple of schools of thought on the subject. I'm not going to get into here. In the midst of this discussion I jokingly (sort of) made a reference...
In recent years I have fallen in love with marketing and I'm wondering if anyone has successfully implemented a squeeze page on their GeeksWithBlogs page? What is a squeeze page you ask? It's a simple tool used by marketers to collect your first name, your e-mail address so that they can put you on their list and give you stuff. http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... People put themselves on your list because they find value in what you are saying and they want to be notified when you have more...
The next Scrum Gathering is coming up and they are having 6 TED style talks. You can help make history by voting to have me present one of those talks I can hear you saying, "Well sure, Malcolm, what can I do to help you?" I'm glad you asked. It's really simple, click here sgnl.uservoice.com/forums/7... and cast 3 votes for my talk "Fortune 500 Scrum Coaching for the developer turned Scrum Master." Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE...
The term "Command & Control" comes from the military, but the concept was meant to describe a separation of responsibilities. Simply put, it's the the officers job to command (give the what), but control (the how) is left to the enlisted personnel to figure out.
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Late last year, Jeff Ello wrote a great article for cio magazine entitled "The Unspoken Truth About Managing Geeks" (http://www.cio.com/article... If you are a non-geek managing geeks you will find this article enlightening. It doesn't provide much in the way of soltutions, but it does show you how you can stop digging the hole that you're in, deeper than it already is. In the event that you are a geek with a manager that just doesn't get it, then just...
I've seen it come up in discussion groups time after time, the management wants to measure productivity in their development team and developers just want to be left alone to code. Recently some one asked: > Maybe it's also time for a frank discussion of "What does the CEO > *really* need" for visibility? Is it really metrics that do not make > any sense (and costs a lot to collect)? No, it's time that we turn this question on it's head, because it's not "What does the CEO *really* need"...
Joining the let’s-find-out club When it comes to a new idea, a mentor once told me that my feelings and past experiences are lousy tools for evaluating that new idea. What he said was something to the effect of, “You need to join the let’s-find-out club. Will that idea work? I don’t know, let’s find out” At the same time, if you are using someone’s already successful system and that system has worked for others, but not for you, just maybe, you’re not really following their system. And don’t say,...
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