Posts tagged: leadership

Agile Isn't Dead, But Your Career Might Be

18 Jan 2024

All over LinkedIn, my feed is full of people saying Agile is dead or that Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches aren’t needed. I understand both the sentiment and the clickbait nature of this kind of headlines. Though if it were clickbait, people would say the opposite of their title in what they write, but they don’t. They continue to write that agile failed, and these roles and frameworks failed, too.

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Stop Doing Things the Hard Way

04 Jan 2024

For the first few years of my career, I wasted a lot of my time and energy doing things the hard way. I should be honest and admit that a big part of me still does things the hardest way possible. A part of me believes that if I can succeed in unfavorable environments, I will succeed anywhere. This is stupid. Don’t be like me.

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Its a Secret

26 Dec 2023

I was sitting down having my coffee this morning and thinking of all the stuff that goes on in most companies that I simply don’t have to deal with, and one thing came to the forefront of my mind. Today, I want to write about one of those lessons leaders learn, often the hard way, which is not always healthy, and what I do about it: Information brokerage.

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Does Theory of Constraints Make Sense for Software?

13 Dec 2023

Two well-known books where leadership and software intersect are The Phoenix Project and The Goal. These books are novelizations of a company that redeems itself by leveraging the Theory of Constraints. While The Phoenix Project is very much a take on The Goal with a software angle, the lesson is the same. So here’s the question: does the Theory of Constraints apply to software development?

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Are Scrum Masters Worth It?

08 Dec 2023

In my last article, I went through a few frameworks and mentioned how there are plenty of Scrum Masters eager to prove themselves. They are a peculiar role in most companies, and many Scrum Masters struggle to answer the question, “What is it you do exactly?”

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The Good, Bad, and Ugly of the Popular Agile Frameworks

06 Dec 2023

If I were to ever write an article that would prompt an argument online, this is the one. There is so much noise and hand-wringing about the one true agile framework that it is impossible to make sense of things. Sadly that puts our community in a position where it looks like we’re more interested in seeing everyone lose than helping anyone succeed. It also puts leaders in a terrible position of having to wade through the online sludge of before trying to make a choice. So, with that, I am going to give my short, no-nonsense guide to Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe.

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