People & Teams
Articles
How Depersonalizing Work and Managing Flow Can Humanize the Workplace Using metrics such as cumulative flow to monitor throughput and quantitative thinking may not seem very humanistic, but by depersonalizing the work being done, we can focus our energies on solving actual problems instead of conducting a daily witch-hunt and shaming people into high performance. |
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Writing in an Agile World Sarah Johnson explains the role of writing in an agile world and how to educate your team members. Remember, agile takes into account that each situation is unique, and you need to determine what makes the most sense for your particular Scrum team. |
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Management Myth 28: I Can Standardize How Other People Work Johanna Rothman writes that organization-wide standards don’t help if management imposes them. If people ask for help with standards, then you can provide local help to each team. And if the teams are part of a program where you have one business objective common to multiple projects, make sure the program understands the problem. |
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QA Management: All Bark and No Bite? Mike Talks shares with us the unlikely story of how his pet German Shepherd inadvertently became his team's QA manager. Talks explains how his German Shepherd was able to gather people together and have them talk to each other, similiar to what a QA manager does—keeping people on task, handing out assignments, and following up with team members. |
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Communicating Effectively in Agile Development Projects In today’s fast-paced workplace, software developers and project managers are confronted with a painful paradox. They are faced with continual pressure to accelerate the development process, but this “need for speed” can result in communication failures—and the accompanying project and quality problems. |
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The Self-Abuse of Sprint Commitment Adam Yuret explains what can go wrong when teams blindly commit themselves to sprints; collaboration and quality suffer when we pressure people to work themselves to death by forcing them to promise things they cannot yet understand. Investing in systems-thinking approaches to improve the lives of our workers will pay dividends in improved quality, engagement, and creativity. |
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Save Your Sanity: Planning During a Health Care Crisis A health care crisis can hit without warning, leaving you both nursing the patient and mired in seemingly endless bureaucracy. In this article, Kathy Iberle shares with us her experience dealing with an elderly uncle who suffered a stroke and how agile methods, like using a visual planning board, can help one prepare and be ready when disaster strikes. |
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Management Myth 27: We Can Take Hiring Shortcuts Hiring is difficult to do well, Johanna Rothman writes in her latest management myth piece. Because everyone who is looking to hire has a job, they think they know how to hire. But it’s not easy. You want to hire the best people you can who fit the team and the organization. |
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It’s Time for Requirements Craftsmanship Holly Bielawa explains that being a a requirements craftsman means that you need to test your assumptions in real time while developing a product. Then you pivot as needed, change your business model as you learn, and constantly get out of the building and gather data to determine your minimally marketable product. |
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Using Agile for Requirements Management Charuta Phansalkar writes on the necessity of capturing and understanding requirements using agile practices. Agile, when implemented effectively, will ensure that the customer's voice is clearly understood throughout the project, which results in maximum customer satisfaction. |