The learning moments happen when something goes wrong, but they aren’t about the “whole” thing. The release might be late, but there was a moment when a developer jumped in and wrote some missing test cases for QA that helped them out. Or when a QA resource went in and grabbed all the extra bugs ready to be invalidated and ran through them. Or when someone started commenting on their code better. Within everything, there…
Do you listen to feedback? (Not hear it). Do you take input from others and go out and try what they ask? Do you get mad when someone tells you you were not doing it the way you’ve practiced? Do you get frustrated when someone points out what you’ve done wrong? Do you argue about the feedback you are being given instead of processing it? The answers to these questions will tell you if you…
They come and go, but at some point, they will rear their head, whether it’s a good day, a great day, or for no other reason that you know, they will emerge – the Team Grump. The Team Grump doesn’t know care for what you are doing, when you are doing it, how much it will help them, or why they are there – all they want to do is get out of there as…
Sprints are built around a release and go iteration by iteration, they have goals, they have plans and they have a direction. But sometimes you need a much more focused sprint, around a problem, around an initiative, where it’s not just about the user stories and the tasks to be done, it’s about what you need to accomplish. The focused sprint isn’t about the release and the delivery, it’s about the thing you need to…
Whether it’s real or manufactured, the time crunch is inevitable. There are only so many hours left to get something done. Time is finite, the crunch occurs because time is finite, if time were not limited, there would be no crunch. The hard decisions then become determining what can be done in the crunch – no one wants to make these decisions because that means something won’t get done. But that’s what a Leader has…