I have recently had an exchange with Thomas Cagley on LinkedIn in response to an article “The Agile Mindset“.  Comments around emotional and organizational maturity were made and Thomas Cagley asked the questions about which one comes first. I said I think emotional maturity must come first.  Without the ability to handle the “real” […]

Project Prioritization  There are two levels of prioritization for agile. The first is the product backlog – the prioritization of the scope of the project.  The second prioritization is how we populate the sprint contents.  The top priority product backlog items are used for the decomposition for the sprint, but there may be prerequisites that […]

  Personally, I find connecting what I already know to some new thing I am learning facilitates and understanding of that new thing.  We have frequently compared agile and conventional project management on our blog, for example, Epic Project Management Battle: Retrospective vs. White Book.  Today we are going to compare the WBS dictionary with […]

First of all, I hate the word human resources for our employees.  This verbiage starts the discussion as if people were fungible.  That people, their talents, aspirations, motivation and capability are identical. That is simply not true.  I just got out of a discussion with a company that left me feeling hopeful.  After working in […]

Simultaneous work and an Agile Approach There are ways to divide the work up using an agile approach.  This can get complicated for distributed teams but for teams that are on the same site the challenge is greatly reduced. We once worked on an embedded development project for an electronic control unit on a vehicle. […]

Recently I was talking with a company that has achieved the level 3 (defined) CMMI from the Software Engineering Institute that provides a measure of an organizations maturity and capability.  During this conversation, I had a flash to another company that had aspirations of being a level 3 but could never make it beyond their […]