Agile – What’s a Manager to Do?

Agile - What’s a Manager to Do?

As a manager, when I first started learning about Agile development, I was confused by the fuzzy way that Agile teams and projects are managed (or manage themselves), and frustrated and disappointed by the negative attitude towards managers and management in general.

Attempts to reconcile project management and Agile haven't answered these concerns. The PMI-ACP does a good job of making sure that you understand Agile principles and methods (mostly Scrum and XP with some Kanban and Lean), but is surprisingly vague about what an Agile project manager is or does. Even a book like the Software Project Manager’s Bridge to Agility, intended to help bridge PMI's project management practices and Agile, fails to come up with a meaningful job for managers or project managers in an Agile world.

How to Game Dev Metrics

What leads teams to game metrics within their organization?

On a recent episode of Dev Interrupted, I talked with agile expert Ray Elenteny, Principal Owner at Solutech Consulting, about how people game dev metrics and the underlying issues in culture & leadership that lead to it.