Example 3: Using a Project Manager with Iterations and Kanban and Silo’d Teams Here, the developers were in Cambridge, MA, the product owners were in San Francisco, the testers were in Bangalore, and the project manager was always flying somewhere, because the project manager was shared among several projects. The developers knew about timeboxed iterations, so they used timeboxes. Senior management had made the decision to fire all the local testers and buy cheaper tester time over the...more »

A reader asked why the lifecycle in Agile Lifecycles for Geographically Distributed Teams, Part 1 is not Scrum. It’s not Scrum for these reasons: The project manager and product owner start the release planning and ask the team if the release planning is ok. The team does not generate the initial draft of release planning itself. In Scrum, the team is supposed to generate all of the planning itself. The checkin is different from the Scrum standup and the objectives of the checkin...more »

Example 2: Using a Project Manager with Kanban, Silo’d Teams This is a product development organization with developers in Italy, testers in India, more developers in New York, product owners and project managers in California. This organization first tried iterations, but the team could never get to done. The problem was that the stories were too large. Normally I suggest smaller iterations, but one of the developers suggested they move to kanban. The New York developers had a...more »

I’ve been working with geographically distributed and dispersed teams for the past couple of years. Some of them on quite large programs, some of them reasonably small. What they all have in common is that they all want to transition to agile. Most of them start this way: someone takes a Scrum class, gets all excited. This is good. Then reality hits. Scrum is meant for collocated geographically cross-functional teams. Uh oh. Almost all of these teams are separated by function: the...more »

I’m so pleased to announce that Shane Hastie and I are leading a workshop on Working Effectively In Geographically Distributed Agile Project Teams, April 17-18, 2012 in Pleasanton, CA. Yes, that is Elisabeth Hendrickson’s Agilistry Studio. Shane and I first delivered this workshop last year in Australia, when I was there for Software Education‘s SDC. We had a great time, and so did many of the participants. We have since evolved the workshop, to address the needs of the...more »

I have posted last week’s Pragmatic Manager, Are You Being Guilted Into Doing More?. At Agile 2011, I had a great video conversation with Shane Hastie about agile project portfolio management. The chair is big, I’m not so short. The chair is big, I’m not so short. How many times do you think I have to say that to make it true? The chair is big, I’m not so short. That ought to do it. more »

My new Gantthead column is up, Who’s Playing Agile Schedule Games? If you liked the schedule games from the more traditional projects, you’ll love the agile schedule games. Please comment over there. more »

I posted my most recent Pragmatic Manager: Are Your “Shoulds” Driving Your Decisions? Yes, in case you couldn’t tell, I am doing a series on project portfolio management, so that you do take a look at my Peer Project Portfolio Coaching. Several people took advantage of the early bird pricing. We’re in the not-quite-early-bird pricing now. And, if you sign up with a buddy, you can still get early bird pricing for the two of you. It’s a steal. If you are...more »

I have an article posted at Techwell, Management Myth #1: The Myth of 100% Utilization. This myth has always been a problem. It’s even more of a problem now as more organizations transition to agile. People need time to think. They need time to adapt to their current circumstances. They need time to create their teams. Some of the time, people are thinking about this iteration’s stories. Some of the time, people are thinking about the product roadmap. Some of the time, people are...more »

If you missed my most recent Pragmatic Manager newsletter, Focus on One Thing at a Time, it’s posted. In it, I ranted about the delays of multitasking and introduced a new service: Peer Project Portfolio Coaching. I keep seeing people trying to make the transition to agile, still multitasking and not able to say No to all those projects–at all levels of the organization. Partly, it’s because they don’t have the tools, which is why we’re talking about the project...more »

I chat with Ward about the 10th anniversary of the Agile Manifesto and his newest wiki project.  The best conversation happened directly after the podcast as we discussed what an audio wiki might look like.  Sorry the bits were not rolling on the digital recorder. Hope you enjoy this. -bob payne more »

I have finally posted my most recent email newsletter, Three Myths and Three Tips. It took a while because I was converting my site to WordPress and I did not want to maintain the site in two places. I have finally transitioned fully to WordPress. What a relief. All my old articles are finally posted. I have tagged back to somewhere in 2006. I’ll keep tagging as I get around to it. What do you think? I’d love your feedback. more »

For years the software community has been pushing the MVC architectural pattern to organize and separate the concerns of our applications. So far we seem to have done a decent job of accomplishing that based on the enforcement of the pattern in the most successful web frameworks such as Rails, Grails, JSF, Struts and many others. The last frontier for MVC seems to be the sometimes convoluted world of JavaScript; the client tier of our web applications. Although frameworks like jQuery, Prototype,...more »

I’m at the end of redesigning my website. I’m posting and tagging my articles now. These are the articles from several years ago I didn’t get around to posting because it was too much of a pain to do in Dreamweaver. Yes, I’ve transitioned to WordPress site. I’m planning to unveil it next week. I have a question for you, my loyal readers. Aside from typical tags, such as “project management,” I can also tag my articles with the outlet in which they were...more »

This thought has crossed my mind before... since it is on my mind now I thought I might share. Perhaps it will help someone on their software development career path... or perhaps it is just me venting...The Art of CodingOne of the greatest challenges of coding is being able to understand it. Skill in coding is being able to understand the problem well enough to create a solution (otherwise known as coding). Great Skill is being able to write a solution so that someone else (including the...more »

The nice folks at getabstract like Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects. Some of the takeaways they highlight are: Project portfolio management helps you finish your software projects on schedule. You must understand your mission to make choices about prioritizing software projects. Managers must select which projects to undertake and which to avoid. Create a visual overview of all current and upcoming projects to depict who will work on them...more »

In recent years there have been a couple of tools that stand out when it comes to helping me be productive. One of those is the groovy test framework Spock. It is worthy of an introductory blog post... but that isn't this post. One of the challenges to Spock is the documentation isn't a complete as one would hope. The Spock Basics is fantastic when getting started but it is what it claims to be basics. I've been speaking with NFJS on the subject of Spock for the last half of 2011. On...more »

I’ve been working with several management teams who want me to train them or their project managers to take over the agile training. It’s not unreasonable from their perspective—it’s how they’ve transitioned to all the other process improvement approaches over the years. Except, none of the other process improvement approaches have been built on the notion of self-organizing or self-managing teams. None of the other approaches have been built on the idea that...more »

I hope that  this 3-part series on how to move to continuous integration and how to evaluate if it’s worth moving to continuous integration on your program convinced you moving to continuous integration was worth it for programs. The reason continuous integration is an issue on programs, is because the lack of CI can delay the technical program. That, in turn, can delay the overall program. That affects the project portfolio and often delays the start of other projects or programs. It...more »

To continue our story from part 1 and part 2… The teams have determined their individual impediments to Continuous Integration. You, as the technical program manager, and the technical program team can take those impediments, with input from the teams can see the impediments to program-wide continuous integration. You have used a similar problem-solving approach, including the rule of three (which I learned from Jerry Weinberg) to generate some options for your problem solving. This is...more »