Norms and Rules
Filed under: Leadership, Process, Project management, Quality
I was chatting with someone the other day about my upcoming trip to Germany (I’m actually writing this one in the departure lounge). He was over there during the summer, and as a way of helping me ensure I had a good time, he noted “just remember, there are social norms over there, but there are no social rules”. Makes me ponder the relationship between the two. Read more
Hardly a Silver Bullet
We’ve been collecting data on a number of teams over the years, and now have responses from close to 800 participants. The questions cover demographics, practices and performance, and are designed to understand what is going on, not to pitch a particular approach or practice. I thought it would be interesting to compare the results from those that claim they are using agile approaches against those using other industry frameworks. Read more
Attacking Technical Debt
Two of the artifacts of incremental or iterative development are that you tend to use scaffolding as you go to prop up the product, and you tend to build similar capabilities in several different locations. Over time these can add up to quite a bit of cruft, or technical debt. Read more
The 5 Biggest Team Delusions
Filed under: Agility, Process, Project management, Teamwork
Over the years, there are a number of statements that I hear that make me step back for a moment. Some are relatively new, some have been around as long as I can remember, but every one of these, in my experience, usually means something very different (and less effective) than what the words might indicate. I’m sure there are more, but this is a start. Read more
À la Carte
It is common in many French restaurants to highlight a table d’hôte on the menu, which literally means ‘host’s table’. Most will simply go with this option, but my preference is usually to pick and choose to find the meal that suits me best, to order à la carte. My experience with development processes and software companies is quite similar. Read more
Real Assurance
In almost any field you can imagine, there has been a concerted effort to improve quality by proactively managing the process and systematically eliminating the errors that one would otherwise encounter again and again. I say almost, because even though there is no rocket science behind these techniques, most software organizations still don’t get it, and continue to waste gobs of money and work with massive risks. Read more
Improvement Cost?
I was talking to a couple of people last week about the situation in their organization. To cut a long story short, suffice it to say that there were plenty of symptoms of trouble, and management had settled in on the expectation that it was going to cost millions of dollars to clean things up. Once I got up from the floor, we talked about why I believe that an attitude like that will almost surely lead to disappointment. Read more
Training for Value
It would be naive to suggest that I don’t generate a good percentage of revenue from training engagements. Unfortunately, it would also be naive to suggest that these engagements consistently provide the most value for my clients. In fact, the opposite is true in many cases. Not because the training provided is bad (as there is plenty of objective evidence to the contrary), but because most organizations bring in training for the wrong reasons. Read more
Art and Science
The March 2009 Edition of Harvard Business Review has an excellent article entitled ‘When Should a Process be Art, Not Science?’ Many great insights, but as with most things that we try to categorize, there is primarily a sense in the article that we need to choose, that the answer be one or the other: art or science. Relegated to a sidebar is the notion that science can be a platform for art, which I see as the primary insight in the article. This is something that anyone that works in that ‘process’ niche should think deeply about, even if you are like me and prefer to not utter that ‘p-word’ too loudly. Read more
Driven to Distraction
From what I have seen, many ‘process improvement’ initiatives have failed to live up to expectations, and some have definitely done more harm than good. Perhaps this is because even the term ‘process improvement’ implies a distraction from the real point of the exercise. Read more
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