“Can-do thinking makes risk management impossible. Since acknowledging real risk is defeatism, the risk management function in a can-do organization is restricted to dealing with those smallish risks that can be mitigated by quick action. That means you confront all the risks except the ones that really matter.” (Tom DeMarco, Why Does Software Cost So Much? Dorset House 1995)
Of the many, many...
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I’ve always been concerned that some agile practices are applied even when they are not appropriate for a particular situation. I’ve called this Agile 101, learning the basics,...
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Short iterations can cause Agile teams to lose focus and begin oscillating rather than iterating. This can happen from several perspectives—business, technical, user—and it’s...
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Jim Highsmith - a fellow colleague at ThoughtWorks and one of the original co-authors of the agile manifesto - has written a really interesting paper on the idea of Adaptive Leadership,...
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As I talk with companies around the world it’s clear that a significant number of them are still mired in the productivity, efficiency, and optimization mud. It’s easy to spot them...
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October, 20th “Stop Doing Agile and Start Being Agile,” Part of the ThoughtWorks Webinar series on Continuous Delivery.
All of us fall into clichéd phrases about the constancy and pervasiveness of change—yet our conceptual framework and management practices still view change as an exception. Most...
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A good leader has to be a visionary, a teacher, a motivator, a facilitator, and other things, but she must also be a decision maker. The same is true of lead engineers for technical...
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In Agile Project Management, I wrote a short section on a performance metric called “shortening the tail.” I liked using the metric, tail length, because it is easy to calculate...
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One thing people are learning is that you can’t plan uncertainty away. Plans are good for things we know, or things that we may have some control over. However uncertainty—and its...
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In my executive presentations I spend a fair amount of time on the topic of Do Less, talking about how we waste an incredible amount of time and money building features that are rarely...
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There were quite a few interesting posts this past week–whose topics ranged from what motivates us to how we may have erred in fundamental assumptions about executive compensation.
“Chaos...
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One of the most vexing issues for executives and managers is balancing the need for both predictability and adaptability in software delivery. While this might seem like an either/or...
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