Author Archives: Ed
Your IT Project may be riskier than you think
Massive budget and schedule overruns continue to plague business and government projects alike. Flyvbjerg and Budzier’s recent research published in the Harvard Business Review shows that among the 1400 projects surveyed, on average they were 27% over budget. Even more … Continue reading
12 Questions for Better Presentations
I recently had to put together a presentation. While I enjoy putting together presentations, sometimes I forget that I’m not the audience. While my technical knowledge of how to conduct a meeting, plan an iteration, or hatch an evil plot … Continue reading
Leader Standard Work & The Team Kickoff Meeting
Leader standard work is a concept in Lean Management, popularized by David Mann in his book “Creating a Lean Culture”, that creates standard work for managers. For many in the Agile community, the notion of “standard work” brings a repellent … Continue reading
Do unmade decisions cause you stress?
Decision Time, or is it? At the last Lean Software Meetup, Jeffrey Fredrick quoted a line in David Allen’s book Getting Things Done book that stuck in my mind: “Decisions not made cause stress.” As someone who has been on … Continue reading
Good to Great now not so Great
Esther Derby tweeted a great question that stuck in my noodle the last week: estherderby: skimming Good to Great. some profiled companies ain’t so great anymore. Since Good to Great provided great inspiration for me, this caused me some consternation. … Continue reading
Action your impediments daily for continual improvement
Here is a very clear blog article by Chris Sterling outlining the rationale behind capturing and assigning actions for impediments at the daily standup. He explains the connection to the continual improvement philosophy of Kaizen. Spot-on, Chris. We’ve used this … Continue reading
Leading from the Middle
“The Key role of middle management is reinvention.” Tom DeMarco Often I hear of Agile Adoption best occurring top down. Salesforce.com did that, from zero to Agile overnight. Other times I hear about bottom up Agile , or Agile in … Continue reading
“Hitting the wall” with your Agile Adoption? Try adding technical practices…
This is a great post that uses the familiar metaphor of the gym and physical fitness to apply to adopting Agile. I’ve seen the pattern described here too often. Developers start out the first three sprints and produce production ready … Continue reading
The connection between sailing and software
I wrote this post about sailing “inside” vs “outside” the boat. I learned much from participating as a crew member on a sailing team. It positively influenced my work with software teams, as I’m sure any team sport would. Tweet
Bay Area Agile Philanthropy Group
A group of folks interested in using agile values and principles to give back to the community is going to meet in January to charter the Bay Area Agile Philanthropy User Group (BAAPUG). This will be on January 17 at … Continue reading