Month: April 2013

Agile Project Management, Leadership, Lean, Planning, Teams

Agile for Fragmented, Part-time Teams

I have a client who uses lean and agile-like processes outside of IT on research and development projects. They have been doing this for a number of years to help optimize constrained tools (drilling platforms) and resources (specialist inspectors). They like the agile concepts of prioritizing based on business value, working in short cycles, expediting rush jobs and frequently validating results and adaptation. Recently they asked for help with some improvement initiatives that use multi-disciplinary teams to investigate and improve cross-department processes. These groups are staffed by senior engineers who volunteer to help make improvements, but the work is low priority and their time extremely limited. They are also geographically dispersed. Obviously that creates problems for agile practices like daily […]

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Agile Project Management, Events, Games, Metrics, PMI-ACP, Travel

Learning Analytics

Professional athletes watch slow motion video of their performances to find areas for improvement. Armed with this information they can then work on these weaknesses and improve their performance. When studying for an exam how do you objectively measure your skills acquisition and areas of weakness that need to be worked on? Practice tests can help, especially if the questions are categorized into knowledge areas so we can tell which topics candidates understand and which they need more work on. As a trainer I am also trying to get feedback from the group on whether people understand what I am talking about. I ask them of course, using questions like:  “Does this make sense?”, “Are there any questions on this?”, […]

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Agile Project Management, Books, Games, Leadership, Planning, Teams

An Antidote to Velocity Obsession

Getting things done is great; to get things done is why we start things in the first place and why we follow through even when presented with obstacles and setbacks. We do things because they will (hopefully) bring us to some better state. So getting these things done quickly is good because we arrive at this better state sooner.  We track our rate of development (velocity) as a useful measure of progress and also as a leading indicator towards when we should be done. However focussing too much on velocity is dangerous; it leads to myopic mindsets and even moronic behaviour. Yes, velocity is good, but not at the expense of quality, good-will, or noticing subtle changes in direction. At […]

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