August 19, 2020
It’s good to take a day off here and there. Not only to recharge your batteries but to see what your team is able to do in your absence. What do they pick up? What do they own? What gets dropped? What falls through the cracks? How many emails do you come back to needing an urgent reply? Where does the team need more support? In short, where are the gaps and what do you need to do to fill them in so you can find the new gaps.
August 13, 2020
When Agile works, it is because everyone is working towards it. It won’t work if you have one group using it and four others looking in and going – “oh that’s nice”. Does that mean you need to follow the agile manifesto to the letter? Never – pick what works and start from there. Regardless of what you pick and what you apply, it’s a mind shift and one that doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t need to get all those four other teams to use it as you are, but you do need to get them to buy into the
August 10, 2020
A new episode of Remotely Prepared is up and it’s on a topic that I’ve just been hearing and experiencing so much since the Covid-19 pandemic hit and that is community. Community of your team, your company, your friends, your customers, everywhere you look, communities are pulling together to help one another get through this. It’s fantastic to see. Full episode is here – https://www.upsidedownoffice.com/podcast/its-all-about-community
August 5, 2020
I was listening to a great podcast in the car today – “Programming Leadership” – and the topic was on Agile Development. At one point the interviewee on the cast said something along the lines of – “you learn a couple of methodologies, you put them into a toolbox and you pick what works for your organization and you do it.” – I almost pulled the car off to the side of the road. I’ve been saying this for years to teams that are hooked on having to follow a methodology for the sake of following it. Don’t. And this
July 24, 2020
It’s been almost four months that people have been working remotely – many from the unfortunate locations of their couch, coffee tables, basements with no windows, the list goes on and on. These aren’t ideal workplace scenarios for many – they didn’t volunteer to be work remotely on the flip of a coin, they were told not to come in. On Remotely Prepared, we do our best to help you navigate this new environment and like many things, it doesn’t happen overnight, it takes weeks, months, many months to get good at it (and that’s with the best equipment. We
