project management
Can you grok Agile without a programming background?
The last fourteen years have been strange. The Agile movement, which was spawned out of the controversy over Extreme Programming, skyrocketed into success, and was subsequently taken over by the project managers who all but pushed the programmers out. We’ve seen the creation, the wild success, and the corresponding...
Read more
Agile Game Development is hard
I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to write a blog post about why Agile software development is inherently more difficult for games than other software. I searched for some fundamental reason, such as games being works of art, or being entertainment, or being more difficult to test, or...
Read more
Removing external hiring as a tool (Part 3 of 3)
In this post I hope to explain how hiring externally as a tool for fixing problems ultimately leads to a weaker organization. When I began writing this post, I was having a hard time. Whereas the post talking about what a bad idea firing is was easy, the situation is...
Read more
Removing firing as a management tool (Pt 2 of 3)
So in my last post, I wrote about the possibility of taking hiring and firing off the table as a management tool. In this post, I will focus on the firing. Firing itself has two halves: individual dismissal as a way to fix performance problems, or layoffs as a...
Read more
Removing hiring and firing as a tool (Pt 1 of 3)
Inside of Mike Bland’s response to my Project as a Ship post is this comment of how he organized his Google Grouplet: I had no power to hire or, truthfully, even fire anyone. The best I could do was persuade whoever was interested to participate, to give them the clearest...
Read more
The Flawed Project-as-a-Ship Analogy
It is common for a project leader to see his or herself as the captain of a ship. The project is seen as the ship, and the developers are the crew. When storms hit- the project is behind schedule, over-budget, below quality, falling short of projections and expectations- the...
Read more
Spotify’s DNA of Autonomy and Collaboration
Anders Ivarsson, an Agile Coach from Spotify, was kind enough to present his talk from Agile Ísland at our company on Friday morning. It was ostensibly about “scaling agile” but really it was a talk about how they’ve created a culture that prizes autonomy and collaboration. I’m personally tired of...
Read more
Balancing Team Autonomy and Centralized Control
What is a leader on a multi-team Agile project supposed to do when there’s an expectation to make decisions that would bind all teams and for which he or she cannot hope to consider all viewpoints? I often found myself in this position with generally two types of decisions...
Read more
Hansoft is horrible
I’ve used Hansoft for 5 years across 2 jobs. Over that time, I’ve had more arguments about Hansoft than I wish to remember. In this post, I’m going to present a dialogue between Socrates, a software development, and Phonion, a Project Manager (Producer, Product Owner, Product Manager, whatever) about...
Read more
Twitter’s reorg takeaways
I just read through a great Twitter blog, New Tweets per second record, and how! It covers in some depth the changes to their engineering organization over the last three or so years. As CCP is undergoing similar technical stresses (we hit our PCU record recently), and responding with similar...
