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Is the Problem with Your Agile Tool, or How You’re Using It? While using index cards and a wall can function just fine as a kanban or Scrum board, issue-tracking tools such as Jira can make it easier to manage a backlog, especially with a distributed team. But these tools are more complex to use and can add their own overhead to the process. You need to keep things simple. |
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Absentee Leadership: The Worst Kind of Manager Absentee leaders are managers who are physically present but psychologically absent. They are incompetent and disengaged, to the extent that they don't support their teams adequately. If you have an absentee manager (and don’t have the luxury of seeking another position), here's how you can try to handle the situation. |
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Making (and Keeping) Project Risk Visible Project managers recommend how much should be invested to address various risks based on their understanding of project context, but the final decision about what to do and when those efforts are sufficient belongs to the sponsor. Risk management requires executive input, so sponsors need to see all risk data you have. |
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Good Process, Bad Process “Process” is a word that seems to have a lot of baggage. Depending on whom you ask, process is either essential to delivering value, or something that gets in the way. But this is the wrong way to frame the issue. A process is not inherently good or bad; it's how you use it, and whether it's right for your situation. |
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Planning Strategies for Successful Project Management One of the central responsibilities of a project manager is to establish the most suitable strategy for project delivery. That means creating a plan for success and predicting potential issues that could affect the project. These strategies can help assess the amount of time and effort for each facet of the project. |
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Scrum Roles, Goals, and You The Scrum Guide specifies that there are three roles: product owner, developer, and ScrumMaster. It’s essential that a Scrum team have each of these roles to help it work well. But depending on how you implement the roles, you may end up hurting rather than helping your Scrum process. Focus on goals, not job titles. |
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The Problem with the People-Management Bell Curve Conforming team performance evaluations to a tidy bell curve is a simple, quantitative solution to the challenging problem of rating employee performance. However, it doesn’t work. It’s unrealistic (not to mention counterproductive) to force-fit employee evaluations to the curve when that doesn't reflect their work. |
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Does Agile Have Too Many Meetings? Because agile favors lots of short meetings, it may seem like they take up a lot more time. But when you compare it to time spent meeting in the pre-agile days, it's usually actually less. However, this doesn’t mean all meetings you attend are useful. Here are a few tips for deciding if all your meetings are necessary. |