InfoQ Homepage Leadership Content on InfoQ
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Agile PMs Get it Right the Last Time
In his Gantthead article, "Get It Right the Last Time: Developing an Agile Attitude," Doug DeCarlo challenged project managers to ditch the counter-productive "get-it-right-the-first-time" philosophy practiced for so long by so many. Instead, he has proposed some Agile attitudes to help managers think differently about what counts.
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What Creates Individual Productivity? Can We Improve It?
Is it helpful, or even possible, to change the productivity of individuals in a collaborative team? What exactly constitutes productivity, when deliverables come from teamwork? It's a tricky subject. We bring you highlights from a conversation held a few weeks ago on the AgileProjectManagement list.
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A Status Update on the OpenAjax Alliance
Coach Wei, CTO of Nexaweb, has written a status update on the OpenAjax Alliance and the challenges he see that exist for Ajax Adoption. He sees the biggest hurdle to Ajax being confusion as a result of numerous Ajax architectures. He also lists several technical issues that he feels the alliance should address such as toolkit loading, name collision, and event interaction between Ajax toolkits.
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Easing into XP - for the Harried and Stressed
One can't always start from scratch with Agile - sometimes it's used to salvage troubled projects, but Emanuel Gaillot notes that "What's tough about XP is, the more you need it to get your project in a better shape, the harder it is to start doing it." Can a team really afford to switch in the middle of a troubled project? Gaillot recently shared his approach to gradual XP implementation.
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Managing Agile Projects - How Hard Can It Be?
Agile projects emphasize self-organizing teams and tight IT/customer collaboration, but does this relieve managers of their role? Liz Barnett, editor-in-chief at AgileJournal.com believes it does not... that the manager role remains critical, though Agile does change it. Her recent article on managing Agile projects recommends some practices to focus on when switching to Agile management.
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Fowler: "Agile Imposition is a Very Red Flag"
Martin Fowler, one of the original creators of the Agile Manifesto in 2001, reflected last week on reports of Agile process being imposed on teams from the outside. He states his reaction succinctly: "Imposing a process on a team is completely opposed to the principles of agile software, and has been since its inception."
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Dangers of Agile Adoption
Siddharta Govindaraj has been noticing what happens as Agile is adopted by more mainstream enterprises. He outlines five points that companies need to watch for when adopting agile processes - and what to do about them.
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Opinion: Putting Overtime in Perspective
Agile work, when done in a disciplined, creative way, tends to be very intense, so Agile leaders encourage balanced lives for team members and promote "sustainable pace". Mitch Lacey, a Microsoft Program Manager, recently blogged about his emerging understanding of how to use this XP practice appropriately.
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Holacracy - The Self-Organizing Enterprise
The fit between Agile teams and traditional enterprises can be challenging. Agile may highlight or exacerbate pre-existent dysfunctions, in areas a project manager may not be well-placed to address, so those involved in Agile roll-outs are thinking about alternate ways to organize the enterprise. Holacracy, created at Ternary Software, suggests that self-organization can extend outside IT.
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Selling Your Good Ideas
In this month's edition of StickyMinds, communications consultant Naomi Karten has written a short article "Developing Sales Savvy" which may help your new ideas reach the ear of a resistant colleague. She notes that, while sometimes you just get lucky, there are other times when *how* you sell can be as critical to your success as what you sell.
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Is Project Status Relative?
Scott Ambler introduces a term for a familiar project phenomenon: the "green shift" that occurs when people rework status reports to make them more politically palatable to management. But can management actually handle the truth?
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Agile Coach = Agile Secret Police?
Software engineer Paul Tyma, in a recent blog entry, tells us "I don't get this new craze of a job called 'Agile Coach'. I mean, everything I've read about Agile and XP seems dead simple." Though not a proponent of Agile, Tyma has done XP, so perhaps there's a basis for his view that an Agile Coach is not so much a 'coach' as "a hall monitor or a secret police officer."
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Industry Survey Reveals The Bitter Truth About IT ROI
A Ziff-Davis CIO Insight survey on Business Value reveals little improvement in how, or how well, IT is measuring value, even though most firms now try to use metrics such as IRR, NPV, return on assets, or activity-based costing. There's no consensus or consistency on which measures to use, or when to use them. And half of respondents doubt that the measures are even accurate.
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Interviewing for Agile Teams Podcast
Team dynamics can dramatically affect team performance, so staffing teams well is a critical success factor. Rob Myers, an Extreme Programming coach, has recorded a podcast "Interviewing Techniques for Staffing Lean-Agile Teams."
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Measuring Performance in the Adaptive Enterprise
Traditional thinking has turned budgets into fixed performance contracts that force managers at all levels to commit to specified financial outcomes, despite the fact that many of the underlying variables are beyond their control. As Agility increases the futility of this exercise becomes apparent. Thought-leader Jim Highsmith proposes a helpful alternative more harmonious with Agile values.