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The other day I had hot discussion about the value of certificates. We went through certificates for developers mainly but the issue is general: how much value certificates bear from the company’s perspective? The point where the whole discussion started was when we started analyzing what the most objective way to appraise engineers is. Typically organizations have some appraisal system…
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Recently a subject of leadership pops up on Software Project Management pretty often, but usually I look at it from manager’s perspective. After all that’s something I do for living – managing teams. So yes, being a leader is the first and probably the most important role of manager (by the way, the post on role of manager turned into…
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This is the question which I hear very often: should we move back cards on the Kanban board when we realize the feature isn’t that advanced as it looks like? A typical example may be about feature which has been developed and is being tested and it appears some bigger patch has to be applied. Another, more interesting one, may…
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I failed. It wasn’t very spectacular. Well, if I asked people around they wouldn’t even say it was a failure, but for me it was below-average performance. Thus failure. Did I feel bad? I did. I couldn’t help. I knew I shouldn’t but after all I’m just a human. But then I consider it as much better thing which happened…
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It seems recently I’m telling you a lot stuff about people management and managers in general. If describing the role of manager wasn’t enough you could also read a rant about screwed promotions which we see so often. This all stuff is good (yes, such a shameless self-promotion), but it assumes one optimistic thing: you can still make decisions who…
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In one of recent postings I asked you how big your backlog is. My argument was that trying to enforce small backlog size is counterproductive. Although small backlog is easier to manage throwing things away from it just to keep it small isn’t the best idea. However that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do some backlog maintenance from time to time.…
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The other day I was asked to discuss how we can improve the way one of our software development teams works. Well, actually it was rather something like “Pawel, help us to implement Kanban” but, as it soon appeared, it wasn’t that simple. A typical discussion about implementing Kanban Me: So where do we start? Colleague: Um, I’m not really…
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Once your organization start talking about performance reviews you usually hear about some formal system with the same structure for everyone involved. That doesn’t really sound like a good idea, right? Why companies are using this approach then? If you have like a couple hundred people on board C-level exec can’t really say anything reasonable about vast majority of people…
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On my AgileCE presentation on Kaban I said that if your Kanban board doesn’t evolve over time you should treat it as a warning sign. It possibly means you don’t improve workflow. And since there’s no by-the-book implementation of Kanban you should experiment all the time. So what has changed on our board recently? I can start with things which…
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I took part in a very interesting discussion today. We were talking about criteria we should use to appraise leaders and managers in the organization. The most surprising part, at least for me, was discussion about notion of line manager among disputants. It came out that we considered average functional manager as anything between pure-manager to person who does 90%…
Hi, I’m Pawel and I’m your host.
Leadership in Technology is a blog dedicated to wide variety of topics related to running a technology business.
Among others you will find here: product management, agile and lean, leadership, organizational design and more.
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