InfoQ Homepage Management Content on InfoQ
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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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Danube Releases ScrumWorks v1.8
ScrumWorks, the free Agile project tracking software from Danube Technologies, this week announced the release of version 1.8, which adds a Product Import feature to bring existing projects into the tool, a number of customer-requested changes and significant performance enhancements.
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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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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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Presentation: Agile Project Management Planning and Budgetting
What happens to planning when teams "self organize"? Agile methods are empirical: plan it, do it, evaluate, plan again. David Hussman reviews practices for planning a project, release, iteration.
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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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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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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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New Release of V1: Agile Enterprise Development Suite
This new release from VersionOne allows all project stakeholders -- project managers, executives, developers, product managers, customers, and testers -- to collaborate and coordinate plans and progress much more effectively. With extended support for the Agile life cycle, this tool offers better visibility into the entire software development process.
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ScrumWorks Release 1.7.0 adds Tagging
Danube Technologies' latest ScrumWorks release 1.7.0 includes an important feature for enterprise users who need to trace back to multiple backlogs or integrate with other project tools - tagging and filtering with user-managed "themes".