I am a huge fan of self-organizing, self-aggregating, self-directing teams. Huge! I have been witness to how much more productive and effective these teams are over traditional command-and-control teams subject to autocratic management styles. The self-organizing teams also foster an environment of elevated trust, shared responsibility and accountability. Gone are the days of internal finger-pointing or blame shirking. Without a doubt – these teams are better.

But on a few different teams I have worked with, I noticed some interesting things happen which I can only attribute to human-nature. more »

Time Wasted Managing Contract Changes
Technology projects are dynamic. Change is inevitable. Change comes as a result of many factors: shifting priorities, changing opinions, new learnings, volatile markets, shrewd competitors, emerging technologies – just to name a few. So how are changes dealt with on Fixed-Fee, Fixed Scope (FFFS) contracts? Enter the super-charged change-control process. more »

Right around the time the dot-com bubble burst, large companies began focusing their technology almost exclusively on cost-cutting initiatives. It makes sense: it was time to reduce the bloat that had been accumulated during the hay-days of the bubble. It was at this time that the Fixed-Fee Fixed-Scope (FFFS) contract became a wildly popular vehicle to control project costs. Companies and vendors would agree up-front to delivering a predefined set of functionality or requirements for a set price. Any future changes to scope would be negotiated and agreed-to (in writing) by both parties. This is the first in a multi-part series on why Fixed-Fee, Fixed Scope projects are bad for customers. more »

I see and hear it all the time: “Who needs an Agile Coach?”. Well, maybe you don’t – but most enterprises do. I cannot tell you how often I hear the groans and whimpers of new Agile teams trying to figure it all out on there own. Maybe they picked up a couple of XP books and decided to go solo. Or maybe a couple of folks went and spent their two days becoming ScrumMasters and now felt that the designation provided the knowledge and skill to fundamentally change the way their organization and team delivers projects. Perhaps someone high up attended a conference and couldn’t wait to dive into the Agile frenzy. They don’t all fail. Some teams emerge as success story. But more often than not, those teams that attempt to adopt agile without the help of an experienced coach are destined to suffer pitfall after pitfall; misstep after misstep; mistake after mistake. And yes – very many of them do fail. more »

There is no doubt that in the past year or so there has been a huge surge in the area of internet technologies that is today commonly known as RIA – Rich Internet Applications. There are a few other techno buzz words I can throw in here that may or may not make it clearer to what the industry is referring to: such as AJAX, Flex or Lazlo and there are a host of others. Even more commonly we hear the now famous “Web 2.0″ moniker used to describe anything from blogs and vlogs to the “pageless experience”. more »

I first posted this on the yahoo scrumdevelopment group in a hope to stimulate some conversation – or at the very least, to stimulate a funny-bone or too. Not sure if I got there so I post it here as the maiden post of the BigVisible blog. May there be many more to come.

A little while ago, after returning from Agile 2006, I posted a remark about how the biggest threat to Agile is not the Pro-Waterfaller or the Anti-Agilist but rather the Crappy Agilist. Well, following some deep introspection and more »