I’m at Agile2005 this week. I always expect to meet interesting people at this conference, and I haven’t been disappointed.One of the people I’ve met was a reviewer for Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Greate Management (which I co-authored with...
I want to follow up Joshua’s comment that it’s high time we focus on the people side. What does that mean?I ran into someone who described how he had handled a “people” issue. I’ll call him Joe. Joe believes he’s adept at handling...
Robert Watkins comments about insincere appreciation in response to my post on the recognition gap:A good example is the concept of the “Praise Sandwich”: take one piece of praise, one piece of criticism, and another piece of praise….and how he...
[rant]Last week I heard someone espousing a new form of project review called a Retrospective. Here’s what she advised:Anonymous feedback via survey or questionnaireRanking of questionnaire resultsFunctional groups discussing questionnaire results in...
I’ve talked to a bunch of people lately who tell me they are doing iterative development. When start asking questions, it sound more like they’re doing something between iterative development (as I think of it) and waterfall: All the requirements are done...
I’m in Boston for a book-writing week with Johanna Rothman.We’re focusing the skills managers *must* have — the skills that form the foundation for effective management:Managing one-to-one Building relationshipsSpeaking the language of the business /...
I spent a couple of days with Charlie and Edie Seashore last week. The were in town through the local Organization Development Network.The Seashores are elders in the arena of change, diversity, and working with groups. They are also co-authors, with Jerry Weinberg,...
I walk through a variation on this statement (originally from Norm Kerth) at the beginning of a retrospective:The Retrospective Prime DirectiveRegardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he/she could, given what...
Ned Batchelder sent me a link to his post, Engineers are People. I really like the way he compares emotions and hunger. Emotions are like hungerImagine workers weren’t allowed to eat lunch or snack during the day, and hunger was considered a weakness that should...
Laurent Bossavit posts a discussion of the reasons to deep six the status meeting. The problem ? A status meeting’s traditional format has the person who convened the meeting, a manager usually, work through a list of items. They are items of importance to the...
One-on-one meetings are a vastly underrated management technique… well done one-on-one meetings, that is. I find them useful particularly when the group I’m managing is a group, not a tight-knit team, but I’ve used them when I was managing project...
This weekend, I was talking to a friend about her relatively new job. She’s pleased that she’s gotten some training in new practices, and is able to use them on the job. And she wishes she could go back to the training session. She’s an OT, but I...
Johanna Rothman asks, in a comment on my last post on Collaboration and Teamwork, “How do we build these skills? These are the “soft” skills that many of us struggle to build.”I talk about what’s worked for me and what I’ve seen...
Laurent Bossavit quotes these instructions from a college exam for testers: Incipient.oO{}: Certifications, degrees, teamwork “It is essential that you work on this exam ALONE with no input or assistance from other people. You MAY NOT discuss your progress or...
Keith Ray posts this snippet of conversation: Ron Jeffries posted his email conversation with Jon Eaves on XP mailing list in “Bug tracking vs user stories” [ jon ] “Projects that have developers working on multiple simultaneous projects have a 30%...
Frank Patrick responded to my post on phoney actuals with a couple of pithy quotes about the perils of one-dimensional measures (for lots more on this read Robert Austin’s MMPO): “Tell me how you’ll measure me, and I’ll tell you how I...
I found this on Joe Ely’s weblog Learning About Lean: Central to any Lean system is Management by Sight. An effective system is very visual. In less than two minutes, any associate must be able to assess if the system is in or out of compliance. He tells a...
