It is no secret that I love planning. I’m not coming out of the closet now, that’s been true forever! And at some point in my life I was even “cool” with that. Additionally, I want you to know (although you will not yet understand why) that I still love planning. That’s me 🙂 Now …
As he looked at numbers e noticed that the oscillations of his model did not repeat. In fact he entered the numbers again, and again, and again but his model would refuse to behave the same way twice. During our long education we were taught that given the initial state of a system (the present …
Many teams start their agile transition from the “developer-side”. This is quite normal, developers (coders and testers) feel the pain more than others because they need to actually get the product/system finished. But by focusing on developers, aren’t we missing something? Aren’t we forgetting that many of the consequences we so detest come from un-informed …
The ideas of “pay-for-performance”, and it’s twin sister “management by objectives” exist to try and increase the performance of a group and ultimately the whole company. The basic idea is: promise them a carrot and they’ll work more / better. But is that true? Can a company really perform better by promising people they will …
Last year I was involved in the organization of a unique conference. LESS2010 was a unique conference because it brought together different communities. We wanted to make sure that people with different points of view would discuss those points of view. The aim was to create a space for sharing ideas from different communities in …
I am writing this blog post to explore a concept. So bear with me, I’ll probably ask more questions than I’ll answer. Why do most Agile fail in our companies (or government organizations for that matter)? My view is that we cannot actually transition from a command and control management paradigm to Agile / Complex …
Today I’m on a mood for a rant. Be warned! 🙂 I constantly get gob-smacked (to borrow a term from a friend) about the lack of simple understanding of reality. Let me explain. One particularly common symptom in management is that they tend to “believe” (that’s the word) that they can affect what happens in …
Walking a tightrope without a net maybe good entertainment, but it’s hardly what project teams enjoy the most. When the deadline comes and your team is late, you know why that is. No matter how well you plan (and you must) there will always be a volcano or a flood or simpler things like changing …
In a meeting today I was graphically reminded of how some of the basic concepts in software development still escape many of us. Case in point, the meaning of capacity. In many people’s minds capacity still means “how many man-hours we have have available for real work”. This is plain wrong. Let’s decompose this assumption …
Many of the readers of this blog have probably faced this situation already in the past. When I was adopting Scrum in a local company, I was faced with the tyranny of setting targets. Targets and bonuses were part of that company’s HR policies. “This is how we motivate people” as the saying goes. Now …
