InfoQ Homepage Leadership Content on InfoQ
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Resolutions: Integrity of Code and Conduct
At the start of each New Year, some of us stop to look backward, and actively resolve to move forward wiser than before. Scott Ambler, Liz Barnett and Kirk Knoernschild have shared with us their recommendations for working smarter in 2007, including: take a hard look at at your business objectives; equip your teams properly to maximize agility; and above all - behave yourselves!
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Gender Gap Continues to Increase in IT: Gartner
A recent Gartner report on the gender gap in IT states that although many feel that women are "innately better suited than men" to navigate the new global economy, they are not choosing to enter IT - and some are leaving. Gartner predicts that by 2012, 40% of women in the IT workforce will leave traditional IT career paths.
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Performance Goals For Agile Teams
Inspired by Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith's book The Wisdom of Teams, Mishkin Berteig looks at the importance of performance goals for driving a team towards self-organization and accountability.
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Noted Professor Decries "Macro Management"
Dr. Henry Mintzberg, an outspoken and controversial scholar in business school circles, recently decried the "heroic leadership" stereotype which undermines organizations, propagated by the press and by MBA programs that stress leadership at the expense of practical management skills. He sees a need for more "distributed leadership," whose effectiveness lies in a community itself.
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Responding to Urgent Requests
In his article "How Two Hours Can Waste Two Weeks," Dmitri Zimine describes the costs associated with changing development priorities after the beginning of an iteration. Joel Spolsky took issue with Dmitri's comments, which in turn were defended and elaborated on by Mishkin Berteig.
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European Leadership Summit at the Agile Business Conference 2006
"Agile Business Conference 2006," will take place next week in London, Europe's largest Agile conference. The first day is dedicated to the Agile Project Leadership Network's "European Leadership Summit." The conference is specifically created to provide practical information to managers and leaders, and it allows attendees to interact directly with industry experts.
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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.