Here’s the final part of my series on middle management. In this one, I talk about how to deal with a promotion where you end up managing people who used to work in the same capacity as you – your former peers, so to speak. If you haven’t yet, do check out the first of…
Category: Engineering Management
Scrum and Kanban: What’s the difference?
When working in an agile model, two task management techniques are often at the top of the list of approaches a team might take – Kanban and Scrum. Some call these processes in themselves, but the way I see it is they’re more of a practice or tool for managing tasks. They’re really very similar…
Closing The Loop: Teams and People
To most, “closing the feedback loop” may sound like nothing more than management jargon. As a matter of fact, it is. But behind every management buzzword, there usually lies a simple truth that we could benefit from paying a little attention to. This is the final part of my series on closing feedback loops. Check…
Deal With The Riskiest Parts First
Reflecting upon a project (still ongoing) that I did with ATeam last year, I realized a few things that I, as owner of the backlog, could have done towards a better result. The project’s been delayed quite a bit and while it’s owing mostly to almost the entire team working on it part time, I’ve…
Tuning Out and Tuning In
I’m officially at the tail end of my holiday break today, as work resumes for me tomorrow, January 6th. All things considered, it’s been an incredible time – the best holiday season I’ve had for as long as I remember. The reason it was so great was that for two weeks, I managed to tune…
Are Rules Ruining Your Team?
On the topic of “management by context, not control”, I wanted to write a bit about a realization I came to just recently. Reflecting on how my year had gone, I couldn’t help but think there was something innately self-defeating about setting too many rules in your team. Rules – restrictions, deadlines, quotas – are…