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Questions for project audits – part two
When auditing a project (or taking over a project or even taking on a senior role in a team) I like to go and talk to everyone in the team. When I do, I generally ask them the same questions to get a...
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Growth or reduction in technical debt – why not just ask the team
I just posted an article on measuring quality and maintainablity. But I am waiting for my tea to boil so I thought I would start a new article. One of the things that often interests me is that teams...
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Ask the team about technical debt – the creeping doom graph
I was just talking about the sad state of affairs where some teams know they are making life harder by taking shortcuts or creating workarounds that will slow the team down in the future. In fact, my...
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Unusual predictors of team success
I was reading Daniel Pink’s book “Drive” and I came across a passage about predicting which teams are likely to be successful. It describes a guy who counts the number of times he hears people use the...
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Talking about retrospectives on another blog
I was running a course on “facilitating workshops in agile projects” when some of the crew asked what different questions they could ask in retrospectives (instead of just “what worked and what...
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It may be logical, but does it make sense?
If you have been reading my blog, you have probably heard just about all you want to hear about logic for a while. But I suffer from the opposite problem – Logic-o-philia (not a real word). But a...
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Would you hire a project manager to plant a tree?
Many great ideas fall on deaf ears. So organisations bring in project managers to make sure we implement good ideas properly. Good project managers define and clarify the idea, break the idea into...
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Famous BAs in history: Mark Twain on interviews
I stumbled on a letter from Mark Twain where he comments on “the interview”: Inteviews are pure twaddle Controversially, he claimed that interviews are appalling and should be completely abolished …...
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Focusing questions and project charters are great, but where do you start?
I am starting a bunch of small projects at the moment and people are rushing to help define the solutions. That is great but I am (as always) nervous that we are providing solutions before we really...
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The dark art of office politics for IT leaders (part one – why is it stressful?)
Apparently office politics is a horrible thing that other people do. But many of the emerging IT leaders I speak to get told they need to be better at “soft skills” and “influencing at a senior level”....
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I thought training was easy – what is going on here?
I spend a lot of my time training people in areas such as agile project delivery, business and product innovation and business analysis. Allegedly I spend around 50% of my time running training...
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It may be logical, but does it make sense?
If you have been reading my blog, you have probably heard just about all you want to hear about logic for a while. But I suffer from the opposite problem – Logic-o-philia (not a real word). But a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Would you hire a project manager to plant a tree?
Many great ideas fall on deaf ears. So organisations bring in project managers to make sure we implement good ideas properly. Good project managers define and clarify the idea, break the idea into...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Do you get value from your retrospective?
A retrospective is a meeting where the team stop working and take a step back to review how well they are working and what they can do to improve. It is generally done every sprint (or every two weeks...
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