Month: December 2010

Agile Project Management, Books, Leadership, Risk Management, Teams

Functional Teams

A big part of project management is working to grow a high performing team and then caring for that team so it stays healthy and productive. Agile concepts around empowered teams and team decision making support these goals and so there should be no surprise that agile project management aligns well with team development best practices. However, it never hurts to better understand some of the things that can go wrong on teams so that we can quickly take action and hopefully resolve issues before they become full blown team problems. Patrick Lencioni’s book “The 5 Dysfunction of a Team” lists the following 5 common problems that build on from each other to undermine trust and eventually performance. 1) An […]

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Agile Project Management, Leadership, Teams

Customer Engagement

Agile methods encourage partnering more closely with the business customer to benefit from shorter customer feedback cycles. When this works, it is great; we get quick confirmation of deliverables and engage in collaborative evolution towards the true business requirements as opposed to the originally stated requirements that may have been flawed or incomplete. Yet poor customer feedback can really undermine progress. Effectively the customer has become a more central member of our project team and just like a poor BA, developer, or QA, the impact of a weak customer link is significant. Often customer engagement issues stem from confusion over roles and levels of involvement. Perhaps the customer has not been invited into development teams before and may feel uncomfortable […]

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Agile Project Management, Events, Weblogs

8th in Top 50 Leadership Blogs

LeadingAnswers recently placed 8th in the Top 50 Leadership blogs list, rated by The Entrepreneur Blog. This was a great surprise and I did not even know it was nominated for reader voting. First and second spots went to Seth Godin and Daniel Pink so I am honoured to be listed in this kind of company. Many of the other sites were new to me and I am guessing new to you also, check out the full list and maybe discover some other sources of leadership information.

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Agile Project Management, Games, Leadership, Metrics, Teams

Agile Star Quiz

 So you think you know agile? Well then why not take the Agile Star Quiz and find out if you are really an agile star or more of an information black hole. The questions in each category start out easy, but get harder. Score yourself either manually with the answers shown below or use the attached Excel Agile Star Quiz and scoring model spreadsheet to generate your agile star graph scores. History1)    The Agile Manifesto was created at a meeting at:     A) A rugby match, Auckland, New Zealand, February 2001      B) A ski resort in Vail, Colorado, February 2001     C) A ski resort in Snowbird, Utah, February 2001     D) The OOPSLA software conference, 1999 2)    The last three “Agile […]

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