Tag: Management

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Considering The Scrum Guide

It is perhaps unsurprising when you consider the widespread adoption of the framework by development teams around the world that there seems to be almost as many variations of practices as there are teams working under the auspices of Scrum. Over the years since Scrum burst onto the development scene as a new way of organising to deliver complex work, a host of techniques, customs, and habits have found their way into how teams implement Scrum in the real world. Anyone who has worked with different teams in different organisations can tell you how these customs can vary and of the delight that can come with introducing to a team a practice that you saw work somewhere else.

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Psychological Safety Webinar

Earlier today I was fortunate to be able to participate in a webinar for Laois and Offaly Education and Training Board on the subject of psychological safety in teams, which is a topic I care deeply about as it’s so essential for cross-functional agile teams to be able to operate well, but beyond that, ensuring psychological safety at work is in my mind simply the right thing to do!

Check out the video and slides below.

Psychological Safety SlidesDownload

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Lessons Learned in 2020

A lot has already been written about the year 2020 and I’m confident that an awful lot more will be written about the impact on society this particular year has had. As the events of the year unfolded and various aspects of life were forced to adapt to the different challenges that were thrown up, it seemed like more and more material for academic papers, theses, policy documents, training materials, and even half decent fiction was being presented on an almost daily basis. From the technology leadership perspective I think 2020 showed that there’s work to be done around how to adapt Agile processes to remote work, but while interesting this isn’t the only area where there’s something to be learned, so in the best traditions of the internet here’s a list of things I consider among the lessons 2020 taught.

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Leadership in IT Projects

I’m a big fan of Starship Troopers. Before you run away screaming please note that I mean I’m a big fan of the 1959 book by Robert A. Heinlein and only a regular level fan of the 1997 Paul Verhoeven movie. Heinlein wrote science fiction about the nature of government and the role of the people in society. In a later novel he stipulated the things that a human should be able to do and one part of the quote always interested me, to paraphrase Heinlein: a person should be able to “…take orders, give orders, cooperate, and act alone” when necessary. Sound advice, especially the giving and taking orders part, and doubly so when it comes to project management.

Leadership, Starship Troopers style! Would you like to know more?

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The Nature of IT Projects

Project Management, on the scale that business managers are really considering when they talk about it, is radically different from IT Support as the nature of the projects under consideration moves to a different level.

Ask a senior manager in an Irish SME about project management as it relates to IT and they are unlikely to think about server upgrades or even moving from one version of an email system to another. What this term is more likely to conjure up is images of a suit-wearing professional organising large-scale projects; for the SME this would mean projects like Finance, ERP, and CRM system implementations.

Project Manager: A suit-wearing professional who organises large projects, drinks coffee, updates Facebook

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