A team with a full-time organizer is not “self-organizing!” My path from technical writer to Agile Coach started at Los Alamos National Laboratory 25 years ago. A new project was framed as a rewrite of a manual. But it became clear this required getting four groups on the same page—pun intended—within and across groups, and …
Cheap Agile:
Good Evidence is Hard to Find
A Short History of Scientific Evidence for Managers In my first post on evidence-based management, I explored the gap between what researchers know managers should do to improve organizational performance, and what managers do. Before telling you how to close that gap for yourself, in this post I want to make clear you aren’t responsible …
Melt Down the Iron Triangle
Success rates for projects as judged by the “Triple Constraint” of scope/quality, budget, and cost, are miserably low. Less than half of any type of project succeeds on just two of those metrics, according to decades of surveys including the most recent from the Project Management Institute (PMI).[1] So many of the factors in success …
The Management Knowledge/Practice Gap
Dangers when Doctors Ignore Science In the 1980s, researchers began raising alarms about the lack of current scientific knowledge among practitioners in a business clearly based on science: medicine. Although hundreds of medical studies were published every year to update our understanding of the human body, only a small percentage of doctors were consulting that …
Seeing Past “Willful Blindness”
I often tell the story of a project manager at Microsoft who wasn’t very good at it. Among other reasons, he didn’t use project management software to control the work, despite Microsoft Project being the industry leader. Once he and my office-mate drove separately to an offsite meeting. She got there first despite having left …
DevOps was Born of Bad Agile
Nathan Harvey, a Cloud Developer Advocate at Google, is at the forefront of the DevOps movement. What is DevOps, you ask? AH-HAH!! Exactly. That is part of the reason I went to hear him speak, because the definitions I had been hearing did not make sense to me. They all just sounded like what Agile …