Strategic Planning for Teams

Creating strategic plans for an individual team is not something I’ve found is common but I feel it can be worthwhile. Typically, we are given goals and do the work to figure out how to achieve them, and that cycle repeats itself regularly over time. I found that when I got my first development team … Continue reading

Resource Planning

One of the most common questions I’m asked about running Agile projects and teams is how do I do resource planning. The short answer is that it’s a three or four step process; understand available time, iteration planning, release planning and then long term planning. Available Time There are a couple of things to consider … Continue reading

Weekly Wrap Up – Coursera and Customer Service

One Thing I Learned File this under a ‘Duh!’ moment – Every January we spend the month archiving a year’s worth of data from all cubes, cleaning up unused tables and procs, and doing of review of data to ensure that we’re still using the most accurate measure and that our dimensions are sound. This … Continue reading

Weekly Wrap Up – Asana and Elevate

One Thing I Learned I picked up quite a few Word hacks this week from getting back into the writing habit, I’m using the spike and have added a bunch of new keyboard shortcuts to my arsenal. My favorite though is SHIFT + F7, this activates the thesaurus for you and you don’t even have … Continue reading

Measuring Success – Projecting

We ended last year with of an average of 40 completed points per iteration.  It’s much less than what I thought we were going to have and I’m still a little on the fence as to what exactly causes the gap between our planned and actual points, and it’s likely more than one cause (more … Continue reading