Oh, that’s helpful. *sarcasm* Not only is it not helpful. It’s annoyingly redundant! I mean, I get it. You don’t want to broadcast system specifics because of security concerns. But this happened on an intranet website used exclusively by a development team. My development team. Why do I now have to go dig up the …
Goals: Where I Am Headed in 2019
Where I Am Headed in 2019 Where am I headed in 2019? I had a pretty bang-up year in 2018: scrum master certification; lots of challenging development work in JavaScript and C#; many books read; new connections made; multiple hours of leadership training; and I started this website. But that was last year. This is …
The Final Thing on My 2018 To-Do List
The Final Thing on My 2018 To-Do List The final thing on my 2018 to-do list that needs to be completed is finishing Caitlin Walker’s book, “From Contempt to Curiosity.” I have a few chapters left. It’s been highly thought provoking to this point. Clean Language One big take-away for me is the realization that …
The Scrum Diaries – #4: Empowerment
Empowerment Something I really love about the Agile mindset is that it fosters a sense of empowerment among team members. People are given agency to make decisions, to take initiative, to take ownership, to add true value to the team and the product. Leading by Example and Invitation In September, I got pulled into a …
The Scrum Diaries – #3: Connecting Up
Connecting Up Several weeks back, I published an article titled “The Agile Imposition” in which I described my experience with the Agile transformation occurring where I work. I told my tale of having worked on a Scrum team for quite some time before our CIO implemented the organization-wide transformation, which has left me feeling cut …
The Scrum Diaries – #2: Your Command and Control are Killing My Motivation and Creativity
Awareness As I’ve grown in my understanding of the concept of self-organizing development teams I’ve become more aware of the ill effects of command and control management. It takes the life out of people, makes them dull, limits them, disrespects them. At the same time, the person doing the controlling feels stressed, maybe angry, alone …
Soul-Crushing Meeting
Grab your latte and get ready to join the conference call that never ends! From the hold music to the endless circular conversation, the Soul-Crushing Meeting Playset will keep your kids busy for hours! I was going to write a blog post on “Tips to Make Conference Call Meetings More Effective.” But why bother? We …
7 Tips for Making Meetings More Effective
Here are 7 tips for making meetings more effective. Before you say, “Do we really need another article on making meetings better,” take a look at this photo and tell me if people look this happy in your meetings. I have a hunch many of you would have to say, “No.” Either the folks in …
The Scrum Diaries – #1: Steps in the Right Direction
The Background Here’s the background. I’m part of a small Scrum team that started work on a particular project over the summer. Our project manager, to whom most of the team reported organizationally, moved on from the company near the start of this project. We had a change of business analysts in September. I joined …