Choose Your Battles

June 21, 2010
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Organizational changes are hard. The bigger the company is the stronger it defends its status quo. Humans wearing their employee hats aren’t so much different from those wearing their user hats – they like what they know, thus they don’t like changes. But there’s often someone who isn’t happy with current state. So you are [...]

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You Can Manage Your Boss

June 16, 2010
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I often hear this excuse: “I don’t have power to change this.” Hell, I use it by myself way too often. It is a convenient excuse. Since you aren’t in position to do something the easy way you take a step back and do nothing. And this is wrong. Let’s take a typical situation: your [...]

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We Know Nothing about Our Teams

June 14, 2010
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I am a chatty guy. Catch me while I’m not overworked and I will gladly jump into discussion. If you happen to be my colleague, it may be a discussion about our company. That’s perfectly fine for me. I believe in transparency so I won’t keep all information as they were top secret. This means [...]

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Best Practices: Continuous Build

June 11, 2010
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Under my recent post about best engineering practices I was pointed that it is just another “do whatever works for you” or “I don’t know experiment” kind of advice. Well, it was that kind of advice indeed. Have I ever given you a different one? Anyway I admit shot was on target. If someone is [...]

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Risk Management in Small Teams

June 9, 2010
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I was taught risk management the classic way. You know, risk log, voting for probability and impact, finding out which risks are the most painful, deciding on mitigation plan, discussing results etc. A cool thing in this old-school process is that it activates different members of the team. Even those, who wouldn’t be asked otherwise. [...]

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When Kanban is the Best Choice

June 7, 2010
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Kanban, as any other methodology, isn’t a silver bullet. There are situations and teams when it shows its full potential but there are others where its impact will be limited. Where Kanban suits best then? Micro-sized teams It is said Scrum works best with teams of 7 or close to this size. Sometimes we deal [...]

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Don’t Outsource It to Headhunters

June 4, 2010
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I have a kind of love/hate relationship with headhunters. Few of my friends happen to be headhunters and they helped to find pretty good jobs several people I know. So they can’t be that bad, right? On the other hand I happen to deal with headhunters in my professional life. I can’t say any of [...]

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What Motivates People

May 31, 2010
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Today I attended a training session where we were learning about motivation. I’ve heard pretty poor opinions about the session before, but I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t check by myself. And if you need to know these opinions were crap – training was pretty good. Anyway, we had a very small and very [...]

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The Kanban Story: Swarming

May 27, 2010
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If you’re into Kanban you probably have heard the term swarming. Actually chances are good you’ve heard the term despite your lack of interest in Kanban. What is swarming? In short swarming is all about getting more people to do the task than you’d get otherwise, in normal situation. An example: you have a bug [...]

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SparkUp Conference: What’s New in UX and Web Design

May 26, 2010
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I’ve just come back from SparkUp Conference which is probably the first conference focusing on web development, web design and user experience in Poland. You can find a few words about the conference itself at the end of this post, but my reason for attending the event wasn’t to judge hosts but to catch on [...]

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