There’s two trains of thought in the business world: that the manager needs to be technical and understand what’s happening on the team, or that the manager doesn’t need to be technical and it’s really just about process and metrics and general management skills. I can see the validity to both sides, but I think […]
There is a strategic problem I’ve been wrestling with lately. It’s really just a question, albeit a complicated one. But I have really looked far and wide and been unable to find any good answers to the question, or even many people addressing it or even thinking about it. So to understand the question, let’s […]
Security Doesn’t Have to be Hard Security. Even just hearing the word can make any IT engineer wince. In most big enterprise environments, when you think “security” you think about that compliance engineer who every month brings you a list of vulnerabilities they found that you need to fix by next month. Inevitably, some portion […]
A lot of people think that the best developer is the brilliant person who can crank out tons of bug free code. That person who can sit by themselves, come up with amazing algorithms and solutions to problems, and then get all that code deployed and working. In a lot of cases this is correct, […]
Who really likes meetings? I mean, I’m sure some people do, somewhere. But it seems like a lot of people don’t. So many don’t, in fact, that Scrum and Sprints are designed to minimize meetings. But let’s look at the Agile Manifesto. It says, “We favor…” Individuals and interactions Customer collaboration Responding to change In […]
You can have fixed time and variable scope, or variable time and fixed scope, but a product owner can’t pick both. Lately, I’ve heard this quote several times. At first, it makes sense. A product owner/stakeholder can either tell the team the requirements, and the team can then define the schedule. Or the product owner […]
A recent discussion has come up in my organization. Three years ago we embarked on a “grand experiment”. We re-org’d into 2-pizza service/agile teams, committed to Scrum and DevOps and Agile, trained and hired, and sally forth! For some teams, this was a natural fit and it worked great. There were a couple of in-house […]
When do you know its time to move on? There was a ten-year period in my career where I changed jobs 4 or 5 times. I started to notice a pattern: Year 1: Figure out what is actually going on in the company, and how to do your job Year 2: Try to institute a […]
If you want your company to be agile, then your organizational chart is critically important to your ability to execute. (This is assuming you believe in Boyd’s Law: “Speed of iteration beats quality of iteration”.) But why does the Org Chart matter? What does that have to do with an organization’s agility? Let’s start with […]
A very common question that I see asked is: Should I make the transition from technical to management? Let’s talk about this. Why are you even asking the question? The answer is probably because you’re looking for a raise, or for career growth, and your company/peers/mentors/society is telling you that making this transition is the […]
