Hard work is killing people. Literally!
Burnout is a serious issue for several countries, industries and people, even if we don't acknowledge in as many words. In our industry, where heroism, cowboy programming and all-nighters are considered cool and an integral part of the software subculture, there has been a (really) small effort to address work-life balance....
Let’s free up agile teams…
Why are we so parochial in software industry about not recognizing the bigger economic sense rather than limiting ourselves to a singular idea that collocated teams are the best option?...
How do you design agile feedback?
Feedback is perhaps the most important aspect of the overall agile lifecycle - without a proper, honest and timely feedback, there is no ‘adapt’ step in the inspect-adapt cycle. However designing a proper feedback instrument for a human-human interaction, like a training program, is a totally different thing because it entails imprecise measurements that are often influenced by people’s mental models, skills and experiences, and not to mention - their calendars! Needless to say, these feedbacks could mean anything to different people on different days....
Why is your agile still a lot like dogma on steroids?
I still continue to be amazed (thought ‘shocked’ and 'dumbfounded' will be a more appropriate words here) by the amount of dogma in agile circles. Do this! Don’t do this! Wasn’t agile meant to liberate us from the tyrannies of the so-called big monolithic non-agile white elephant processes, and create a more nimble mindset, flexible culture and adaptive process framework where ‘inspect and adapt’ was valued more than ‘dogma and prescription’?...
Why user stories make sense?
User stories are meant to be a placeholder to initiate an early conversation between the product owner and the team on key hypotheses so that a quick validation of them could be done to refine/confirm/reject our understanding of what the customer really wants....
So, does agile really kill innovation?
In continuation of my earlier blog post on ‘Does Agile Kill Innovation?’, I had a great time moderating the panel discussion at Agile India 2013 with Henrik Kniberg, Owen Rogers, Sujatha Balakrishnan, Udayan Banerjee, Praful Pillay and Sudipta Lahiri. The panel discussion was literally the last program at the end of two long days of management conference – but despite that, we had 60-70 folks throughout the session....
Seeking submissions on New Product Development and Product Management in Agile world for #AgileIndia2012
We are seeking perspectives, experiences, insights and groundbreaking ideas from practitioners and thinkers on how they have applied the spirit of agility to create new products that have led to unprecedented and extraordinary market success compared to their previous conventional practices. Specifically, we are looking for proofpoints from the marketplace to demonstrate how software team’s agility was directly visible in business results....
Project Management vs. Program Management
Program Management is often seen as the next logical step for seasoned project managers looking to take on bigger challenges. While project management is more about managing within boundaries of a project and gatekeeping it against anything and everything that threatens the status quo, program management is typically all about breaking those very boundaries and managing across them by taking up anything and everything that threatens the status quo....
Is Planning an old idea whose time is up?
In the age of nano attention-spans of people, the tendency and respect for planning things upfront has taken a serious beating. The mainstream logic is to simply “play by the ear” because there are far too many moving parts to be completely accounted for and properly factored-in - and in any case, by the time the plan goes to execution, ground realities would have changed beyond recognition, thereby rendering the plan completely useless by that time. In software development, an inaccurate predictive long-range model such as Waterfall has been replaced by more accurate adaptive short-range Agile methods that solve the line-of-sight problem but don’t address the original problem - that of planning a large project with its own share of uncertainties. While none of those arguments might be wrong par se, we conveniently ignore the fact that that is the nature...
Your estimates or mine ?
For decades now, the project management world is divided between top-down estimation and bottom-up estimation. While a top-down approach might have limitations, it perhaps is the only way to get some meaningful estimates at the start of a project. A bottom-up approach might be a great way to get more accurate and reliable estimates but you might have to wait for a problem to be whittled down to that small a level to get such reliable estimates. Both are required for a comprehensive and useful project planning, but unfortunately, most people see one over other, and the Agilists abandoning top-down in favor of the highly accurate but low-lookahead bottom-up methods. A top-down estimation is a great way to abstract the problem without worrying about its nitty-gritties, and come up with a workable estimates when there is no other source of getting...