Guest Post – Self Organizing Agile Teams: The Fine Line Between Freedom and Chaos

I recently wrote a guest post for www.toolsjournal.com. Check it out:

Self Organizing Agile Teams: The Fine Line Between Freedom and Chaos

As always please feel free to leave me your comments here or on the toolsjournal.com site as well. i love feedback.

Managing the E-mail Avalanche

I’m feeling the pressure it at this point in the year, as many of us are preparing for vacation while the constant stream of work builds up. I referring to the barrage of e-mails overwhelming our in-boxes. There are ways to manage this for the long term though here are a few ideas that I’ve implemented or will be implementing…as soon as I catch up on all my email

Taken from the essay: Taking Control of Your Time, one of the “Results-Driven Manager” guides from Harvard Business School Press, the author suggests these four simple steps to message control:

1. Begin your day differently: Don’t jump to your e-mail first thing in the morning. Instead, start the day with a blank piece of paper or a blank screen. Write down a strategic goal and develop an operational plan to tackle what needs to be done first or next. Allocate a block of uninterrupted time to work on this goal.
2. Reply to e-mails at the end of the day: You’re tired then and eager to get home. This means you’ll be better at focusing on the important ones and keeping your responses short. Besides, fewer people will be able to respond immediately.
3. Teach people how to send you e-mails: One executive decided to respond to every e-mail for a week with a note on its appropriateness. He coded his responses as follows: a “1” meant “Keep sending this sort of critical information”; a “2” meant “Unless I’m on this team, don’t send me this information”; a “3” meant “Send this to the responsible person on my staff, not me”; and so on. His e-mail load dropped precipitously.
4. Use better alternatives whenever possible: Make a point of relying on face-to-face meetings, not e-mail messages, for anything that involves ambiguity, interaction or emotion. Technology is only a tool, and it shouldn’t determine how we make decisions and manage our time.

Agile TV for Software Development & More

It’s been awhile since my last post, and it may be a little while again before I publish another post, so I figured that I ‘d highlight a great resource that I ran across in my online travels for new and better ways of applying lean, agile and critical path analysis to projects, software and business management.

Checkout tvagile.com

It’s a great directory of videos, interviews and tutorials focused on agile software development approaches and practices: Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, Test Driven Development (TDD) , Lean Software Development, Feature Driven Development (FDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Continuous Integration, Pair Programming, Re-factoring and several other techniques that can be applied to making your process simple yet effective.

They even ask for suggestions, and accept contributions from their readers. Just check out their contact page.

The 8 Rules of Lean Project Management

The eight rules of Lean Project Management (LPM), re-posted from the Project Times, Summarizing the Rules of Lean Project Management by Claude Emond. A great set of  rules for any PM to follow:

Rule # 1: the “Last Planner” Rule. The one who executes the work is the one who plans the work. This saves time, money and resources due to reduced waste.

Rule # 2: the “Tracking Percent Promises Complete (PPC)” Rule. Do not track time (effort) or cost; track small promises that you can see over time.

Rule # 3: the “Expanded Project Team” Rule. Expand the project team to include and integrate all significant stakeholders, as part of the team as early as possible.

Rule # 4: the “Humans, humans, humans” Rule. Humans execute projects, and project deliverables materialize through humans and for them. So be considerate to humans as, without them, no project can be a success.

Rule # 5: the “Rolling the Waves” Rule. Roll the waves. Make your choices and commitments (promises) at the last responsible moment. Make them in the form of work packages that will deliver the desired results anticipated with a high degree of certainty. Plan the work, execute the work, learn and adapt, plan the work, execute the work, learn and adapt, plan the work, execute the work…succeed!

Rule # 6: the “Opening, Adapting and Closing Often” rule. Open-Adapt-Close, Open-Adapt-Close, Open-Adapt-Close… all the time. The IPECC (Initiate, Plan, Execute, Control, Close) cycle is a recurring process; this recurrence is the true key to successful projects, lean-influenced or not. In order to close a project, you have to open-adapt-close formally at the phase level, to open-adapt-close formally at the work package level, to open-adapt-close for each required deliverable (small concrete promises), to open-adapt-close each required activity undertaken.

Rule # 7: the “Executing Your Small Promises on Single-tasking Mode” Rule. Execute your small promises on single-tasking mode. Once your deliverables are cut into smaller pieces, deliver them one after the other, as much as possible. By cutting your project work in smaller pieces/promises, you will save on set-up time each time you are interrupted, thus accelerating delivery. This accelerating effect can be increased furthermore, if you also try to execute these promises, one after the other, this saving an additional amount of set-up time. In a multi-project/multi-tasking environment, the most productive strategy is to single-task, doing these multiple tasks in series, when possible.

Rule # 8: the “Using LPM Principles to Implement and Adopt LPM” Rule. Live and use what you preach to implement LPM; by “walking the talk”, you will succeed in increasing the speed and extend of LPM adoption and ensure a lasting and fruitful change.