empirical management

Nov

17

2019

The Snowball Effect

empirical, empirical management, empiricism, snowball effect

Start with a small win. In 'Sales' they call this first small win the 'icebreaker sale'. Toastmasters call their first speech as 'icebreaker speech'. Want to run a mile? Start with first few steps. Want to lose weight? Lose the first pound. Start running; start eating less; start fasting intermittently; start on a keto diet; start sleeping more, etc. Start somewhere and empirically move forward from there. Allow your agile teams and team of agile teams to aim for and achieve small wins ... the icebreakers... These small wins will accumulate... increase rapidly in size, intensity, or importance... this is…

Empirically Managing an Iteration and the Work Remaining

empirical management, empiricism

I still remember in my days as Civil Engineer, I used the PERT/CPM -- Program Evaluation and Review Technique/ Critical Path Method -- to manage civil engineer projects (used the same technique back when I used to manage IT projects in waterfall way. I wrote extensively about this PERT/CPM in my book, PMP Companion -- available in Amazon). This is where you get to plot a network of activities and duration... and then determine the critical path. See image below for example. Turn that upside down in Scrum. Throw away the duration... and lots of people get disoriented! People will…

empirical management

Let's start with this statement: 'There is no place for hands-off management in scrum'. To stay on top of the project and make decisions, Management must intelligently use two types of information that scrum provides: 1) first hand observations;2) information radiators. Management must do everything they possibly can do to increase team productivity... then adapt to the results.