Part Time Agile

Recently I presented at IT Brunch online conference with a talk about experience of my team doing part time agile development. Here are some highlights:

  • On a personal productivity level do not mix narrow focus tasks like fixing a bug in code with wide focus activities like contemplating about future of technology in your niche.
  • If your team is distributed in time, but not in space, which is not unusual for a team of parttimers or freelancers, give yoursleves a time to get together and just talk (you can eat your lunches at that time too).
  • It’s hard enough to do even one big thing, let alone two. Don’t try to focus your effort on several major features.
  • General management practices still work: if you are a manager, have one-on-ones with your team members.
  • Do not neglect up front design and specification development. There are situations, when it’s easier to try to foresee a problem, than try to resolve it.
Check out the entire presentation for more ideas (narration is in Russian):
Part Time Agile

There was a questions on where to get more information about one-on-one meetings. I suggest you start with One-on-Ones: The Single Most Effective Management Tool and check out other podcasts on this topic from Manager Tools.

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Route 53 in AWS Management Console (and their hidden reminder)

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Yesterday Amazon announced immediate availability of Route 53 (their DNS service) tools in AWS Management Console, which is great news for all the AWS users. But it also bad news to services like Interstate53, which I was using to manage DNS records hosted on Amazon, because it immediately renders them irrelevant. It is good time to remind ourselves how addon development is not exactly the best spot for software vendors and how in some cases you can still compete against the platform vendor by having significant value add.

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Some Thoughts on Manipulation

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Recently I've got a question from a colleague: "Have you had a situation when somebody was trying to manipulate you  or your behavior? What can be the best way to stop/resist this sort of attitude? Stop any interaction with the person?" From my perspective manipulation, generally, has to aspects to it:

  1. Other person wants you to do something (which is not necessarily a bad thing).
  2. She wants to make you do it in a sort of "covert" way, which I would generally call a bad thing in professional environment.

When it comes to response to manipulation, all things being equal, I would have a conversation with a person saying something along the lines of "Hey, I've noticed that you try to trick me into something and don't like you doing that. If you need something from me, let's discuss, but don't try to trick me."

This kind of feedback serves two purposes: (a) letting other party know that you've noticed manipulation and don't like it (who does?); (b) showing a better way to do business with you. If a case is not helpless, this should help.

What do you do when somebody tries to manipulate you?

Two types of answers

When I'm asked a question, my reply often is "Well, there are two answers to that question: a short one and a long one (or a simple and complex)..." And that is because there are indeed two types of answers to many questions. I would call them definitive and process oriented. For example, "how long will it take to complete this project?". The simple answer might be "we do not know", the complex answer will be "we do not know, but here is how we can control and manage schedule for our project and make it possible to make certain commitments on dates depending on your goals".

Another perspective on these answers is that one of them is like "here it is" and another one is "oh, here is how you get it".Remember that saying that professionals do not always know all the answers, but they always know how to find what they need.

The matter of fact is that process oriented answers are just as important as definitive replies. Of course, we should always starve to simplicity, but if there is no simple solution, we should not abandon looking for complex ones.