Leadership and project management in a typical agile team

In my last article I claimed that you can have an agile project manager who ran agile projects. But the projects I described did not involve “typical” agile teams. So now I want to show that a project manager can work well with a typical agile team. Advertisements

True confessions. I was an agile project manager

I was once an agile project manager. In fact I did it more than once. If that is not shocking enough then maybe I should also confess that I have coached, trained and enabled others to be agile project managers. In this article I will share my experience of being an agile PM without a […]

The problem with project managers and product based thinking

Once upon a time I used to run projects. To be honest I am probably a better BA than a PM, but I have run quite a few projects and my projects always seemed to come through OK. So when I encountered agile projects with product owners on them, I was pretty relaxed.

The problem with project managers and self managing (agile) teams

I sometimes get involved discussions about whether agile teams need project managers. I have a very strong view on this – NO, we do not need project managers, unless of course we do, in which case YES.

What does an agile coach actually do – is it really that simple?

In my last article, I explained what I think agile coaches do in practice. But I did not reveal some of the complications and messy bits that get in the way of adopting the model in any sensible way. So in this article I will explore some of the complexities and messy bits.

How we defined the problem in our workshop, plus a plan on a page

I ran a mini workshop as part of a training course I didn’t really follow the course notes in this exercise so we did not have any standard material to refer back to. People took notes and photos as we went, but I promised to publish a generic version of what we did. So here […]

Extending the coaching agreement – what do agile coaches actually do?

In my last article, I discussed what I think is NOT actually agile coaching. This time I will tackle the tougher challenge – what does a good agile coach actually do? A quick word of warning though – this simple question seems to have resulted in a long article. I apologise for not making this […]