Agile Project Management

Cutting-edge Agile methodologies, software development techniques and project management practices.

A Halloween Story: The Imminent Death of an Enterprise

Masa K. Maeda | Oct 29, 2010 No Responses

Oct 292010

It was a dark and stormy day when it dawned on the project manager. Many full moons ago a new project was planned and leaders established a firm deadline (how ironic!). Technical people slaved day after day and night after night in their cubicle-shaped dungeons, under the promise of succulent bonuses if they worked like zombies until they closely resembled the real ones. Unflinchingly they coded away not knowing if ’twas day or night or dusk or down, unaware of the many little creepy creatures their code was creating. But one night, right before down the bugs started coming out of nowhere and from everywhere. And leaders spoke: “Let the little creatures be, for what …

Business Technology Strategies for the Road Forward

Anne Mullaney | Oct 20, 2010 No Responses

Oct 202010

Here at Cutter HQ, as we fondly call it, we’re in full Summit mode: printing badges, packing boxes, tweaking the final menus – getting all the behind-the-scenes stuff done. But that’s certainly not the exciting stuff! What is exciting is the program. As always (this is the 14th Summit we’ve held here in the Boston area), there’s nothing theoretical about the program or sessions. It’s all about creating and discovering business-technology strategies that pave the way for success. And since there are no vendor sponsors, there are no pitches, subtle or otherwise, about silver bullet-type solutions. Here’s a peek at Monday’s sessions: We’re addressing cloud computing. Lou Mazzucchelli’s tackling this topic. If you’ve ever heard …

Technical Debt & SW Governance seminar agenda is set

Israel Gat | Oct 1, 2010 No Responses

Oct 012010

Jim Highsmith and I have finalized the content and the format for our forthcoming Cutter Summit seminar. The seminar is structured around a case study which includes four exercises. We expect the case study/exercises will take close to two-thirds of the allotted time (the morning of October 27). In the other third we will provide the theory and practices to be used in the seminar exercises and (hopefully) in many future technical debt engagements participants in the workshop will oversee. The seminar does not require deep technical knowledge. It targets participants who possess conceptual grasp of software development, software governance and IT operations/ITIL. If you feel like reading a little about technical debt prior to …

Building an Agile Organization with Agile Leaders

Jim Highsmith | Aug 24, 2010 2 Responses

Aug 242010

In a recent e-mail exchange with Cutter Fellow Lynne Ellyn (SVP and CIO of DTE), she mentioned that one characteristic of agile leaders is providing focus and clarity for an organization or team. Her comments sparked my thinking about why it’s so hard to be a good agile leader. We tend to create lists of what leaders do or their agilelike behaviors, but these lists and the item descriptions obscure the difficulty in actually being an agile leader. Consider providing focus and clarity. It sounds simple, but it’s not. Why do we embrace agility in the first place? Agility helps us manage change and uncertainty. Turbulence — business, economic, and technological — creates change, which …

Changing Playing Fields: The Impact of Crowdsourced Testing on Software Methods and IT Operations

Israel Gat | Jul 28, 2010 1 Response

Jul 282010

The Scrum v. Kanban debate has been relentlessly raging for the past eighteen months. One could only watch with fascination as polarized camps formed around what is after all a fairly dry software method issue. The intensity of emotions this debate generated could almost be compared with those expressed in the debate about abortions. As a practitioner who uses both methods, I tend to view them as arrows in my quiver. Each method has its strengths and weaknesses. The important thing is suitability to the target environment, not the theoretical pros and cons. For example, one could prefer to use Scrum in development and Kanban in service delivery. A macro trend is starting to change …

Agile Managers Build Trusting Relationships with Their Teams

Johanna Rothman | Jul 13, 2010 1 Response

Jul 132010

In First, Break All the Rules,¹ management consultants Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman report that an employee’s relationship with his or her manager is key to that employee’s success and long-term happiness in the organization. Moreover, if people have friends at work, they are more likely to be successful and happy at work. In an agile team, it’s easy to build camaraderie among team members. But if a technical person’s primary affiliation is with his or her colleagues on an agile team, how does a manager build the relationship key to retention? [...]

Change-Resistance versus Doubt

Jim Highsmith | Jun 9, 2010 1 Response

Jun 092010

One thing has always concerned me about the tremendous volume of material about change—books, articles, presentations—and that is an underlying assumption that the change (or preferably the adaptation to the change) in question is a good one. With that as an assumption, then the “problem” is how to align everyone with the adaptation. One of the best models for managing change is the Satir curve (Figure 1.0). The model takes us from status quo, through a change initiation that is resisted, causes some chaos as people learn, and finally ends up being integrated into the new status quo, hopefully at a higher performance level. At any point in the process, the “anti-change” forces may prevail …

Three Governance Metrics

Israel Gat | May 19, 2010 2 Responses

May 192010

“Time is money” is a worn out cliché. However, it bears repeating in the context of technical debt because of the interplay between borrowing time, paying it back and creating value. This interplay forms the basis for the simple yet effective software governance framework. Ward Cunningham originally coined the term Technical Debt to express the concept of a development team borrowing time through taking some technical short cuts. Ward explains this very clearly in this video. The idea is “simple”: release a (software) product sooner to market with the explicit understanding that the technical debt will be “paid back” through refactoring at the earliest possible time after release. By so doing, the development team gets …

Five Steps to Improve Quality

Masa K. Maeda | May 4, 2010 4 Responses

May 042010

Whenever the topic of quality assurance (QA) over a project is brought to a conversation, testing is the first thing to come to most people’s minds. QA actually goes far beyond just testing code. In any case, being test centric can become more effective from the standpoint of QA at the project level if we expand our view of testing by taking the following five considerations: Test the software development process. A fundamental part of continuous improvement is to mature the software development process, whether or not you are using an agile or lean methodology. If you plan a development strategy and stick to it instead of adjusting it to become more effective over time …

Jim Highsmith’s Take on Daniel Pink’s Intrinsic Motivators

Anne Mullaney | Apr 15, 2010 No Responses

Apr 152010

If you haven’t seen the video of Daniel Pink’s TED talk on the surprising science of motivation, you should take 20 minutes to watch now — it’s worth it. Jim Highsmith recently read Pink’s new book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, and it got him thinking about how Pink’s ideas about intrinsic motivators — autonomy, mastery, and purpose — match up with the Agile Triangle. Check out Jim’s recent Agile Product & Project Management Executive Update, “Agility, Measurement, and Motivation” (no registration required). In it, Jim reveals how the agile community might use Pink’s message to foster better self-organizing teams and improve workplace satisfaction. What’s your take?

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