Posted by James King on February 10, 2011
What knowledge does a production support team need when a project goes live? And what do project teams actually give them?
Some agile teams catapult story cards across to the support team with no thought as to whether these will be of any use to anyone.
Even worse, some teams think that being “agile” means “never having to document anything and never having to say you are sorry”.
Posted in Idea management, Implementation | Tagged: agile, knowledge management, production support handover | 1 Comment »
Posted by James King on February 9, 2011
This article is one of a couple I am writing to explain how agile projects can hand over useful information to support teams if they want to.
So this article is a (hopefully) straightforward description of how we can use stories to define the knowledge that to create and handover when the project goes live.
Posted in Agile development, Idea management, Implementation | Tagged: agile documentation, agile knowledge management, production support handover | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 6, 2011
Agile development is becoming mainstream in IT. But people new to agile often ask about the seemingly thorny area of documentation.
Posted in Agile development, Observations | Tagged: agile, documentation | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 5, 2011
Many great ideas fall on deaf ears. So organisations bring in project managers to make sure we implement good ideas properly.
Good project managers define and clarify the idea, break the idea into features and then deploy the features into production. But quite often, people just don’t make use of the shiny new features they have been given.
Which is another way of saying that the great idea fell on deaf ears. So some organisations bring in change managers (and trainers and technical writers) to make sure people understand the new idea.
Good change managers make sure that the project is visible to stakeholders, supported by the important stakeholders and that the features being deployed are explained properly to the users. But quite often, the users go back to their old ways after a week, or they complain about the new features and the “stupid” projects that created them.
Which is another way of saying that the great idea fell on deaf ears. So what goes wrong? Why do so many good ideas fail to get adopted?
Posted in Decisions, Idea management, Leading change, Reflection | Tagged: change management, ideas | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 2, 2011
To really understand any team, it is important to understand the distribution of power within the group and how that power is exercised.
Posted in Implementation, Investigation, Leading change | Tagged: change management, politics, power, teams, tribes | Leave a Comment »
Posted by James King on February 2, 2011
Early in my career, I was told that “middle management” are often the main obstacle to progress in an organisation.
Posted in Observations | Tagged: change management, politics, power, resistance to change | Leave a Comment »
