November 2006 – Leading Answers

November 25, 2006Leadership, Teams

Starfish Organizations

I recently finished reading the “The Starfish and The Spider”, a business book bestseller which explains the benefits of distributed organizations and I was surprised by the many parallels to leadership and agile methods. The unusual title illustrates a key difference between networked organizations and traditional organizations. While they may look similar, a spider has centralized systems and if you cut it in half it will die; cut a starfish in half and it will not die, but instead re-grow into two separate starfish (apparently). Without a single head, distributed (starfish) organizations are very resilient and hard to compete against. Examples of networked entities include Alcoholics Anonymous where each chapter is independent and new chapters can be started anywhere, and […]

November 21, 2006Agile Project Management, Leadership

Deciding when to intervene on projects

I had to stop myself today, I was about to step in and help the team work out an issue, but I recognized they were sorting it out just fine and it would be better to stay out of it. Project managers working on agile projects know that they need to step back and let the team organize their work, resolve issues, and make decisions for themselves. This can be hard to do as the temptation is to “help” by organizing and directing people to achieve the project goals. However, this is not help at all as when the team has authority to make local decisions a step improvement in ownership and productivity occurs. The jury-is-in on this idea; teams […]

November 15, 2006Agile Project Management, Leadership

Agile Methods as a Replacement for Fossil Fuels

(Well, a replacement to non-sustainable work practices at least) Command-and-control management is not appropriate for workers who need to collaborate and solve problems. These knowledge workers need work environments where experimentation is rewarded, people are encouraged to pursue their interests, and shared leadership is the preferred model. Command-and-control organizations are in fact toxic to knowledge workers. They stifle creativity and problem solving by eliminating effective ways for people to communicate improvements back up the chain of command. They demotivate workers with the frustrations of bureaucracy and compliance to standards that divert effort from the true goals. These conditions are harmful to creative teams and people will either leave or have the passion and creativity squashed out of them until they […]

November 7, 2006October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Events, Leadership

Update from the Agile Business Conference

This week I’m at the Agile Business Conference in London. Today was the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN)’s “Leadership Summit” day and the two day Agile Business Conference starts tomorrow. The Leadership summit featured some great talks on Agile Leadership by Todd Little, Pollyanna Pixton and Neil Nickolaisen. The day started with a Leadership Think Tank session. In pairs we discussed the “issues that keep us up at night as Leaders”. I was fortunate to be sat next to Diana Larsen who is a bit of an expert on team leadership and we spent some time chatting about the problems associated with the term “Leadership”. Leadership has this connection with lofty, remote, strategic thinkers (see my 5 Myths of Leadership […]

November 5, 2006October 3, 2026Agile Project Management, Metrics, Planning

Agile Earned Value Analysis Podcast

I recorded another podcast with Dina Scott of ControllingChaos recently. This one is about the problems of applying traditional Earned Value Analysis to Agile projects and then the promotion of some alternative, Agile metrics that answer the same questions. The central theme comes down to questioning the logic of using conformance to a plan that is likely to be flawed as a yardstick for project assessment. Instead I suggest we can employ an extension to Cumulative Flow Diagrams that provide better project indicators. The podcast can be found here and a link to my previous post on Agile Earned Value here.

November 1, 2006Agile Project Management, Planning, Risk Management

Smart Planning: Balancing Functional and Non-Functional Requirements

Agile projects prioritize requirements based on business value. There may seem like no business value in the non-functional requirements of Compatibility, Usability, or Reliability, but if the systems fails to deliver one or more of these “~ilities” then the system is a dead-duck delivering no business value whatsoever. (We may design and build the highest specification car on the planet, but if it only runs on unicorn sweat, needs three hands to drive it, or manages only 5 seconds between break-downs it is not useful.) So, given that we do need to prioritize non-functional development alongside functional requirements, what mechanism do we use? One approach that business folks understand uses money as the prime driver. A fancy descriptor for the […]