Pawel Brodzinski on Software Project Management — Dealing with software projects in real life

Hand-Offs Are Bad (But Unavoidable)

December 7, 2011

Recently many of my discussions on process optimizations come to a point where we focus on hand-offs. When I say about hand-offs I think about every situation when a work item, feature, user story, requirement, or however you call those gizmos you build, is handed from one person to another. Think a business analyst handing [...]

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The Project Portfolio Kanban Story: Project Portfolio Kanban? Why?

November 30, 2011

OK, so I landed in this fine, fine job, leading a crowd (almost 150 actually) engineers who work on, well, software projects. Not a surprise, eh? With such a big team your job is mostly orchestrating things. You just have to keep the machine running and performing well. What you basically need is an overview [...]

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The Project Portfolio Kanban Story

November 30, 2011

The Kanban Story was the idea which came to my mind soon after we I started playing with Kanban with my team back then in early 2009. I thought that sort of live journal of our Kanban adventure can be an interesting thing to read. I knew that we probably got some things wrong initially [...]

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Collaborative Spirit of Kanban

November 25, 2011

Sometimes Twitter is a mine where you can dig thought-provoking gems. A couple of days ago Alan Shalloway said, as a part of a heated discussion, that: People who say Kanban isn’t about collaboration forget that one of the core practices is improve collaboratively (using models/scientific methods). I both agree and disagree. I mean, yes, [...]

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What Makes a Good Retrospective

November 23, 2011

The other day I facilitated a retrospective for a fellow team. My goal, as a facilitator, was basically to help them to suck as much value out of the meeting as possible. Now, before we move on, a picture from a past. I recall a bunch of retrospectives which looked like this: a whole project [...]

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Alternative Kanban Board Design

November 8, 2011

It started with Twitter discussion. Then I followed with a post on standard Kanban board designs. Dominica DeGrandis added her perspective as well. By the way, there’s one lesson I have to take from Dominica and from discussion on Twitter – we need to show people different Kanban board designs so they don’t get fixated [...]

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Don’t Stick to Standard Kanban Board Designs

November 3, 2011

As I’m lagging a bit with my reader I read recent Jurgen Appelo’s article on networked Kanban yesterday. An interesting reading, especially that it ignited a few thoughts (and a great discussion on Twitter with Jabe Bloom, Jim Benson and a few others). First, Jurgen’s experiments with Kanban boards are perfectly coherent with Kanban principles. [...]

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Why I Like to Be Wrong

November 2, 2011

I was wrong. Again. I made a couple of wrong assumptions. Then, one of my flaws played a role and I went with one of these well done solutions before I’d understood the problem. Anyway, the effect was that I was wrong. And someone proved that. Well, not the first time, you’d say. That’s true. [...]

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When Kanban Fails

October 28, 2011

In my story from Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 I promised I will elaborate more on my session there, titled Kanban Weak Spots. The starting point to the session was analysis of a number of situations where Kanban didn’t really work, finding out a root cause and then trying to build a bunch recurring patterns [...]

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Team Retreat

October 24, 2011

I’ve just finished sorting out feedback from today’s team retreat. In my case it was more of a management retreat, as it would be pretty difficult to organize a retreat with all 140 people from my team. Anyway, we ended up having a retreat with all managers from my team, which means we’re down to [...]

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