Practical ideas for managing business systems
On October 1, 2012, I’m speaking at the Agile Testing & BDD eXchange, a one-day conference jam-packed with talks, open-space discussions and brainstorming about the latest innovative ideas, tools and practices in Agile Testing and BDD. You can see the full program here! A distinguishing characteristic of a Skills Matter conference is their insistence on …
I’m sitting in an airport lounge waiting for my delayed flight – the pilot for my flight is on another flight that was already delayed… go figure – going through emails from the past couple of days. I just hit a 15 email conversation between three people but including a group of about 20. I …
I felt the need to climb on to my soap box for a few minutes. As agile has become more and more mainstream, and risen higher in the buzzword index a fairly interesting misconception has appeared with respect to categorization. It seems that whenever agile is mentioned, authors feel this odd compunction to treat agile …
Scaling Up Excellence: Mindsets, Decisions, and Principles – Bob Sutton Tuesday at Agile 2012 started off with a keynote from Bob Sutton, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Standford University and author of Good Boss Bad Boss and The No Asshole Rule. His talk centered around some thoughts for scaling up excellence based on …
Is It Worth It? Using a Business Value Model to Guide Decisions – Kent McDonald Monday at Agile 2012 started off with the opportunity for me to present my session Is It Worth It? Using a Business Value Model to Guide Decisions. I’d like to start off by thanking everyone that attended the session, provided …
These days I deliver more training classes than I attend. That’s not because I think I can’t learn anything new – I’m probably at a higher state of enlightened ignorance than I have ever been – It’s because that’s a big part of how I make a living. Thankfully, I am able to learn things …
Analysts are inherently problem solvers. A couple of days ago, I came across a resource that appears, at first blush at least, to be indispensable for analysts when solving problems related to organizations and groups of people. Chris McGoff identified a set of patterns about group behavior that help to address team or organizational problems. …
I ran across a blog post today entitled Be a meeting whisperer: Conflict Management 101 that I found to be particularly relevant for analysts. It’s about using one of many ideas called PRIMEs to help manage change. While I find the PRIMES concept interesting and will dig more into them later, I wanted to share …
The Scrum Master from a team I was coaching recently asked me to provide a list of 5 things, that above else the team should remember when going forward and when a coach was no longer present. I thought this list would be helpful for others to do as well, so I thought I would …
I recently saw probably the best description of agile I have ever seen, from PMNetwork, the magazine of the Project Management Institute. The article discusses the agile movement 10 years after the signing of the Agile Manifesto, and interviewed four of the signatories in order to get an informed perspective. In response to a question …
“Too much fun? What’s that mean? It’s like too much money, there’s no such thing” Trace Adkins “I Ain’t Never Had Too Much Fun” On an agile project, is there possibly such a thing as too much collaboration? Collaboration is one of the cornerstones of the agile mindset. We’re reminded about it in several places: …
The end of one year and the beginning of the next brought with it a slew of posts covering the top trends for just about every field. I’ve run across three so far, all of them providing a different perspective, some I agree with, some I don’t. Regardless of my thoughts, they deserve reading: Glenn …
Business value is a conversation, not a number. What It Is The business value model is a technique for making critical organizational decisions in an informed and timely manner. Teams using this tool identify the most critical decisions they face, determine when they need to make those decisions, and figure out which information they need …
It’s not quite a 2×2, but it’s still very helpful. What It Is The constraints matrix is a quick way to show the relative importance of a set of constraints facing a project team. Each row represents a general constraint faced by most teams. The most common set to use are: Cost, Time, and Scope …
What is the Purpose Based Alignment Model? The Purpose Based Alignment Model, created by Niel Nickolaisen, is a method for aligning business decisions and process and feature designs around purpose. The purpose of some decisions and designs is to differentiate the organization in the market; the purpose of most other decisions is to achieve and …
