I love it when my readers challenge what I’m saying, as in  Plunge In or Dip Your Toe? (for Projects).
I do believe in small steps for projects. I’ve long been an advocate of inch-pebbles, of standup meetings, of iterations and incremental development. I love knowing what done means, for the project and for features inside [...]

In the Small Steps and Plunge In posts, I said projects should transition to agile all the way. But does it work the same way for the entire organization?
Nope. I recommend a gradual approach to moving to agile. Not all project teams are ready for the self-discipline agile requires. But, even more importantly, too often [...]

I’m a member of a panel Jul 23 for the Boston Agile Bazaar meeting, and am attempting to articulate my two-minute position statement to the question:
How would you characterize your approach to handling people problems on agile teams?
My problem is that I don’t do anything any differently for agile or non-agile teams. I still provide [...]

I’ve been teaching workshops for much of the past few weeks, and I’ve noticed an interesting pattern. I get great comments (and usually good numbers) from people who participate in the workshop. I don’t get many comments, and I get substantially lower numerical grades from people who leave their laptops open during the workshop.
These people [...]

I have a column up at PM Boulevard (free registration required):  Manage Your Project Portfolio and Stop Thrashing. Enjoy!
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I’ve been teaching a variety of workshops recently, some of which are Scrum. One of the questions people have is: Can we do this partway?
No, not Scrum or any other agile lifecycle. You either do it all or you’re not doing agile.
You can work in timeboxed iterations. But if you haven’t gotten to done at [...]

Remember Why Projects Don’t Need Specialists? Well, I decided I had a little more to say. I decided to write an article, What’s So Special About Specialists? Please do comment there or here.
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I’ve discussed this situation with several managers recently. The manager says, “I have a wonderful developer, who can code circles around everyone else. If he doesn’t like someone else’s code, he rewrites it over the weekend. If he sees a hole, he writes a ton of code over the weekend He starts work early and [...]

I taught my estimation workshop twice last week and once the week before, and one thing remains true: Estimation depends on the project lifecycle, how the project is organized, the state of the requirements, and the number of people you have available.
I used a number of simulations to help people see how to estimate, and [...]

I get to see a lot of meeting behavior. A few rules I use for meetings:

End the meeting at 5 minutes before the hour. Most people have another meeting starting on the hour, and this gives them a shot at transportation and bio-break time.
Ask people to turn off phones, laptops, etc directly. If I’m teaching [...]