Stand Back and Deliver
Published October 5th, 2009 Under Books | Leave a Comment
This is a book about leadership. This is not an easy topic to discuss in a book, but this one gives you some tools that will help you to assess situations and act on them. I think that the authors give a very good definition of leadership when they explain their title: “Standing back does not imply abdicating all responsibility, but rather requires leaders to perform a careful balancing act between stepping back to let the right people in the organization do their thing and stepping up to provide steering when the team has strayed off course”. The deliver part exists because the most important measure of success is defined as delivering value to the business.
The first chapter presents the key principles that will be discussed in the book: Purpose – Collaborate – Delivery – Decisions. The chapter about purpose presents a model that allows classifying activities or businesses function according to their market differentiation and mission critical dimensions. The chapter on collaboration emphasizes the importance of letting the people succeed. In the delivery part, the authors propose a model to assess projects using their uncertainty and complexity dimensions. The next chapter exposes ideas on how and when to make decisions. After discussing all these principles, the authors offer you some hints on how to start putting them in practice to change your organization. Finally, a last chapter offers a short summary of all the tools and models discussed in the book. All the concepts are supported by many cases that show how the issues and ideas discussed relate to practical situations.
Despite grouping material from four different authors, this book has a good cohesion and provides a very smooth reading experience. It is certainly recommended to everyone that has to solve business problems through projects in organizations. Reading it, I was even thinking that it contains a lot of very good material that you can apply to your own personal development and projects.
Reference: “Stand Back and Deliver”, Pollyanna Pixton, Niel Nickolaisen, Todd Little, Kent McDonald, Addison-Wesley, 162 pages
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.com
Get more details on this book or buy it on amazon.co.uk
Scrum Planet Looking for Scrum Blogs
Published September 14th, 2009 Under Methods & Tools, News | Leave a Comment
Scrum Planet is a web site that aggregates for RSS feeds focused on Scrum and agile project management. If you know about a good blog feed that is missing from the current roster, I would be please to add it. Thanks for your cooperation.
Should Developers Come Only from Mars but Project Managers from Venus?
Published June 23rd, 2009 Under Humour, Methods & Tools, Software Development | 1 Comment
Once upon a time was the “software crisis” that persuaded people to “engineer” software in a 1968 NATO conference. Methods were created to structure the requirements and the software development process. They use models to define more precisely the requirements and the target system. They had a top-down approach that was aimed at increasing management control on projects. The object oriented revolution changed the perspective of the models with the subsequent creation of the UML, but not the industrial vision of the software development process. In 2001, 17 people signed an agile manifesto that tried to push back the balance more on the “people” side. Two of the main value preferences of the manifesto (“Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”) are explicitly focused on people and their relationships. Read more
Upcoming Software Development Conferences
Published June 3rd, 2009 Under Conferences, Methods & Tools | Leave a Comment
Methods & Tools is proud to be the media partner of many good software development conferences. Here is a list of the upcoming conferences that we support:
* Better Software Conference & Expo, June 8-12 2009, Las Vegas, USA
* Code Generation 2009, June 16-18 2009, Cambridge, UK
* Integrating Agile Conference, June 18 2009, Hoofddorp, The Netherlands
* International SPICE Days, June 22-24 2009, Stuttgart, Germany
* Jazoon’09, June 22-25 2009, Zurich, Switzerland
* Eclipse Time 2009, June 23-24 2009, Toulouse, France
* ProjectWorld & World Congress for Business Analysts, June 24-26 2009, Baltimore, USA
* Agile 2009, August 24-28 2009, Chicago, USA
* Software & Systems Quality Conference, September 14, Zurich, Switzerland
Find an expanded list of software development conferences on SoftDevConferences.com
Confessions of a Serial Product Owner
Published April 20th, 2009 Under Books, Methods & Tools, Software Development | Leave a Comment
Anna Fors gave me the opportunity to host “Confessions of a Serial Product Owner” on DevAgile.com. This free e-book is a short guide to a business person aiming for becoming an excellent Scrum product owner. A further iteration of the experiences of Anna as a product owner will be published in the next edition of Methods & Tools.
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