InfoQ Homepage Leadership Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Throwing the Keyboard is Not the Answer
Conflict is inevitable at work. Sooner or later, you will disagree about what to test, when to test, or how long to test software. How you approach the conflict affects the outcome and, more lastingly, how you feel about the exchange. On StickMinds last week, Esther Derby looked at some of the ways we approach conflict and how they affect solutions - and relationships.
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Does Agile Dispense with Project Managers?
Agile does away with many of the tasks by which Project Managers formerly measured their own performance. The Product Owner and Dev Team take on these activities, leaving PMs confused and wondering: "Am I redundant?" Agile coach Michele Sliger offers some reassurance, mapping PMI PMBOK practice areas to new Agile practices in her whitepaper "A Project Manager's Survival Guide to Going Agile".
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Mary and Tom Poppendieck Discuss Their Next Book
Bob Payne interviewed Mary and Tom Poppendieck at Agile2006 about their next Lean book, which focuses even more on software than the last. Mary summarizes it as "So you think Agile is a good idea: now what?" saying it will help people get started with Lean, going beyond the recipes of the first book to provide practical information and case studies to help teams do their own process experiments.
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Leveraging the Wisdom of Project Newcomers
Experienced newcomers can't be onboarded like programmers just out of school. The experienced professional will have specific but difficult-to-anticipate gaps that will impede their performance. In addition, this provides a great opportunity to get a fresh but experienced feedback on your processes. Gannthead.com offers some pointers wrapped in three fictional Dr. Phil episodes... (really?)
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Agile Alliance Announces Leadership Changes for 2007
On Friday, following the close of the Agile2006 conference, the Agile Alliance announced their new leaders for the 2006-2007 program year. At the annual conference, Agile Alliance members voted seven new members to its board from the slate of candidates mailed out earlier this year, increasing board membership by two members to its maximum of 12.
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Changing of the Guard at the APLN
The Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) held their first Leadership Summit in parallel to this week's Agile2006 conference. The day ended with Jim Highsmith receiving the "Superhero of Agile Process" award, as a thank-you for two years of leadership in creating and developing the APLN. Agile2006 chairperson Todd Little steps up to the challenge. Update: view the list of 2007 board members.
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Recognition Awards Presented at Agile2006
The 2006 Gordon Pask Awards for recent contributions to Agile Practice were presented this evening at the Agile2006 conference closing banquet in Minneapolis, recognizing three outstanding contributors to the Agile Community. In addition, a special award was given to Todd Little, outgoing Conference Chair, for his many contributions to the Agile Alliance and the APLN.
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Increase Your Personal Resilience to Change
"Highly resilient people are best suited for a world of constant change. They don't fight against disruptive change... they adjust to new situations quickly." Sounds useful for members of Agile teams which want to "embrace change", even more so for those experiencing the drastic change from traditional to Agile methods. Bob Weinstein's article lists some ways to increase your own resiliency.
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InfoQ Book Review: Collaboration Explained
David Spann introduces Jean Tabaka's book: "Collaboration Explained" in which she shares stories and facilitation techniques to make groups more effective, and provides templates to get them started.