Why I hate the Internet sometimes

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 Watch my site get slow. Watch me download the logs to make sure nothing happened. Thanks for wasting my time script kiddies.

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Goodbye

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When I started this blog, Agile was not yet the lingua franca of product development. I was passionate about teaching the Chicago community about Agile. I helped start the Chicago Agile Project Managers Meet Up. I presented at the international Agile conference. I was coaching organizations to use Agile practices and how to integrate user centered design into product development. Good times. Based on this blog’s old google analytics data I can see that I was able to help a lot of people.  Today I find myself spending very little time on blogs - reading or creating. My go to places to find content to learn and grow professionally didn’t exist when I started Planning for Improvisation. This blog isn’t needed anymore. As I have moved on, this blog can too. -Kal
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Getting a team over the fear of daily scrums

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::Originally posted on the Pathfinder Development's Blog:: If my previous post about the value of agile meetings over traditional status meetings got you interested, I want to share a common pattern of behavior I often see from teams trying scrums for the first time. Hopefully you can avoid these and save yourself some time. For new teams to Agile the statuses given in scrums are generally … well … lies. “Yep, on time. No obstacles.” I was once told by a colleague that, “You can’t hide on an Agile team.” This is true. However, this kind of exposure can be extremely uncomfortable for individuals to get used to. In traditional software teams people aren’t used to their peers asking them direct questions and paying close attention to their progress.
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Looking Back: Creating a Software Factory – Part 2

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In my last post I talked about the first iteration of the software factory I created. In it I talked about how I followed traditional management techniques to add offshore developers and testers to the team. The changes slowed individual productivity, however we could cheaply add more people from a cheaper labor market.The result was that overall the department hadn’t suffered any deterioration in throughput. Phase Two – A good problem to have – more work. Or…A learning experience. Once the department was stable and was beginning to enjoy some level of regularity the leadership team and I were beginning to look like heroes. We had substantially changed the mix of the department without changing the overall budget and throughput. Our success was not a secret either. We started to receive weekly visits from managers in other departments wanting to talk to us and learn from our experience. Good things rarely last: Unexpectedly, the external market environment changed and mor...
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