Tag Archives: Agile Management

Managing self-organizing teams in an Agile Software Development practice is about encouraging and allowing developers to embody values of collaboration, creativity, quality, integrity, and individual initiative in an environment that provides sustainable pace and opportunities for personal development.

My Management Mission

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As a technical manager, what am I for? What are my core values?

Nurture a passionate, focused, autonomous team. Attract, retain and develop people who do right for their team.

Approach the manager’s work with humility. It’s not about getting people to do what I want. It’s about having a team that owns what they do and does it well.

Wed developers’ desire to contribute and love of problem solving with practices that minimize waste, reward learning and provide continual contact with customers.

Hold the team accountable for their commitments. Have them define their own standards of performance (estimates, quality practices, definition of done). Allow them to feel the inevitable disappointments. Celebrate their achievements. Always expect them capable of improvement. Treat their collective workspace, opinions, and time with utter respect.

Always seek out the next challenge and deliver on commitments.

Don’t wait for ways to provide value to my employer. Anticipate the next change or growth. If wrong, react to it.

Avoid make work. The goal isn’t to keep the team busy. It’s to keep them contributing.

Teach senior management the value of the team by what they do. Project success drives organizational change. It trumps reasoned debate. Project success can sometimes even win out over habit, emotional ties, and political ingenuity.

Treat all people ethically

Authority is a trust assigned to me for a purpose. A leader’s behavior shores up the workplace behavior of others and affects the health, happiness and family life of staff. Be accountable to that.

If there is a purpose in work and in life it is not to create unnecessary human suffering.

Emergent Strategies

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I have managed Oxygen’s Software Development Team for five years.

Spiral JettyEach year, our aspirations grow to encompass widening arcs of project, team, and company.

It all seems planned but it’s a pattern of intended and emergent strategies. Agility embraced from the bottom up with the support of our CTO, Steve Morgan.

Beautiful.

Year Focus Theme
2003 Projects Build mission critical software.
2004 Team Adopt Scrum and XP. Become a real team.
2005 Advocate by doing. Remove obstacles. Perform.
2006 Company Earn trust with the CEO. Contribute to innovation.
2007 Earn trust with the COO. Contribute to revenue.
2008 Consumers Software as profit center!?

The fuzzy front end

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I want to collect together all the terms that describe activities at the start of software projects.

The fuzzy front end

  • Discovery
  • Ideation
  • Brainstorming
  • Chartering
  • Initiation
  • Information Architecture
  • Wire Frames
  • High-level Design
  • High-level Requirements

Big design up front

  • Mocks
  • Conceptual Modeling
  • Specification
  • Detailed Design
  • Detailed Requirements
  • Software System Architecture

Any additions? Please…

You’re an Experiment

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I’m on the management side of the labor divide and yet I’ve never held a position my parents would consider a permanent job. To work these days is effectively to be employed at will.

I once had a senior executive tell me that my team was an experiment. To prove the value of development staff, we had to replace an outsource, maintain their legacy applications, and deliver a challenging new project. If we failed, next year’s budget would go to re-establishing the outsource.

We faced a hard date, skeptical clients and a steep learning curve but we had an honest leader, the means to succeed and a way of measuring it. All we had to do was execute.

I never felt more control over my fate.

Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and LifeA family friend works for Doctors Without Borders. His labor benefits society in ways that will outlive him. In the balancing act that is my life — privileged by world if not New York standards — I’ve deferred, if not entirely foregone legacy. My job is about significance and achievement. Significance comes in providing for my family, not only a biological imperative but a profound joy.

Achievement rests in approaching each year as if it were an experiment. What accomplishment justifies my continued employment? What one thing should I do to materially advance the interests of my employer, our customers and/or my team? It’s the chart of that course that makes me show up in the morning and it’s sightings along the way that allow me to sleep at night.