Managing Chaos: Swarming in Lean Kanban
Anyone who has worked on any Agile project knows that it can be challenging to implement Agile. Pressures upstream, reluctant individuals, and organizational maturity can all play a role in derailing a smooth process. In most instances, we can overcome this through education, collaboration, inspection, and adaptation. But not always. In some projects and organizations,…
Read More
Agile Development Teams: Size Matters
Can I make my project move faster if I simply add more team members? This question has plagued project managers since the beginning of our profession. For many manufacturing-like projects, the answer to this fits into the project management pyramid. If I keep the scope constant and I want to reduce my timeline, I need…
Read More
Hiring The Right Candidate: Why Personality Matters
Articles and books teach us as job seekers how to find the perfect job. Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, talks about the hedgehog principle and his 3 intersecting circles: What are you deeply passionate about? What can you be the best in the world at? What best drives your economic or resource engine?…
Read More
Deadlines, Changing Requirements and Agile Teams, oh my!
There are not a lot of guarantees in life, but change is definitely one of them. Therefore, it is no surprise that while building products, requirements regularly change. Whether the changes are based on new discoveries from users or the market, opinions of product owners and stakeholders, or due to something entirely different, most projects…
Read More
Certifications vs Experience
Rewind to 2 years ago…I was in my final interview for a product manager position at Modus Create, Inc. I was set to speak with one of the founders. I blatantly remember him asking me “So, why don’t you have your PMP certification?” Before I could really think about a polished, polite response, it slipped…
Read More
Why Didn’t QA Catch This?
A Look at Broken Processes Quality Assurance (QA) can get a lot of flack throughout a release cycle, naturally. Isn’t QA the gatekeeper for an application? If a bug is found after a release by a customer then many look to that team first. If bugs continue to pop up then tests – from manual…
Read More
What can the French avant-garde teach us about search?
Alfred Jarry cycling. (Image from Wikimedia Commons) “What can the French avant-garde teach us about search?”. I spent the winter of 2015 through 2016 investigating this very question. From England to Virginia, in the halls of academia a small group of researchers have been diligently working away. Applying ideas from the French Playwright Alfred Jarry’s…
Read More
Product Manager vs. Project Manager
A strong product development team will usually have two extremely important roles defined: the Project Manager and the Product Manager. One common misconception is that the Project Manager and Product Manager’s responsibilities are the same. They are not. I’m not sure if the words sounding so similar has created this thought process or if there…
Read More
9 Ways Agile Developers Can Improve Their Scrum Skills
With more than 10 years of experience in Scrum and Scrum-like teams, I finally decided to get certified as a ScrumMaster. What I thought would be obtaining a piece of paper, was in fact an eye-opening experience. I strongly believe that a lot of my fellow developers don’t understand how empowered and self-organizing they can…
Read More
Writing Solid Bug Reports for Mobile Apps
I bet you’ve been in a situation where you caught a bug, reported it and then your team member (Developer) says: “Hey, I can’t reproduce it. It’s working on my machine”. Those situations are interesting for me. When I hear that from a developer I always wonder: “Is the issue still present in the new…
Read More