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The "Consulting" Contract

Coach Michael Spayd tells us that both contractors and permanent employees can play a "consultant" role, and should think about developing consulting contracts or "designed partnerships" with their clients - not about the exchange of money, but to help create stellar results for the client while working in a manner that adheres to their own values and preferences.

Michael K. Spayd
on Dec 30, 2007
Don't Let Miscommunication Spiral Out Of Control

We miscommunicate every day, with results ranging from trivial to catastrophic. In this seasonally themed article, J. B. Rainsberger shares one of his secret weapons - the Satir Communication Model. It's a thinking tool to help us analyze troubling conversations, and to more deeply understand the people around us, building trust, the first step towards building an effective team.

Joe Rainsberger
on Dec 23, 2007
Offer People Reasons to Love Your Remote Meetings

With an increasingly global workforce, face-to-face meetings are becoming rarer these days. In their place, we more frequently conduct business with a very different experience using a teleconference line supported by desktop sharing tools. Tips and tricks effectively facilitating these interactions, an emerging and important skill, are covered in this article.

Pete Johnson
on Dec 10, 2007
A Leaner Start: Reducing Team Setup Times

How long does it take a newcomer to become an effective member of your team? Learning integral to agile methodologies, but the learning needs of the newcomer are different from established team members: in a standup meeting, "I did (unintelligible) yesterday" offers them more questions than answers. Pat Kua suggests some practices that specifically reduce the "setup time" for new team members.

Pat Kua
on Nov 22, 2007
AgileEVM: Measuring Cost Efficiency Across the Product Lifecycle

In this InfoQ article, Tamara Suleiman explains AgileEVM, an adaptation of traditional Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics, designed to fit a Scrum project management framework. Compatible with traditional EVM metrics, it allows both Agile and traditional projects to be tracked within a single program, giving important early warnings of trends across the entire product life cycle.

Tamara Sulaiman
on Oct 05, 2007
Book Review: The Responsibility Virus Helps Fear Undermine Collaboration

Do "empowered" organizations outperform their command-and-control competitors? Business school dean Roger Martin saw this promising approach fail too frequently. His diagnosis: he calls it the Responsibility Virus, and offers tools to help those who would treat the Virus in their own workplace. Reviewer Deborah Hartmann found this book a good explanation of why process is not enough.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss
on Sep 10, 2007
Culture & Methods

Designing Collaborative Spaces for Productivity

The typical Agile team may work in a common "teamroom", but personal space is also needed. Teams find out fast enough that some of the creature comforts left behind in their former traditional spaces were there for good reasons. This article shares the collected wisdom of dozens of teams who created their own work spaces, as collected by several experienced Agile coaches.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss
on Jul 24, 2007
Experience Report: Beginners and Experts All Benefit in Open Space

Agile conferences are receiving an influx of novice teams and managers, and some suggest that new conferences should be organized for these beginners. To the contrary, this report from XPday Montreal suggests that mixing up expertise levels creates a valuable experience for all.

Deborah Hartmann Preuss
on Nov 20, 2006
Executive summary - An Adaptive Performance Management System

Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts forcing managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, although many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. In this Cutter Executive Summary, Jim Highsmith offers an alternative for the adaptive organization: a project performance management system and a team performance management system.

Jim Highsmith
on Aug 09, 2006
Book Excerpt: Practices of an Agile Developer

This book collects the personal habits, ideas, and approaches of successful agile software developers and presents them in a series of short, easy-to-digest tips. Practical and focused, it offers proven and effective agile practices to make the reader a better developer. InfoQ.com brings you an excerpt, "Chapter 7: Agile Debugging," as a free pdf download.

Andy Hunt Venkat Subramaniam
on Jul 24, 2006
SOA anti-patterns

SOA Expert Steve Jones from CapGemini provides a hands on look at SOA Antipatterns and a list of ways your SOA project can go wrong. This list includes signs that these problems are cropping up as well as what to do when you see them happening.

Steve Jones
on Jun 19, 2006