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

Pull and Push in Kanban

September 12, 2011

Kanban is a pull system. Period. In Kanban everyone pulls the task from the previous stage to another. Developers pull tasks which are ready, quality engineers pull tasks which are built, release managers pull those which are tested, and so on, and so forth. Basically every operation on the board happens that way. Well, almost. [...]

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Juggling Goals

September 5, 2011

The other day I had a great discussion on Twitter with George Dinwiddie on goals conflicting with each other on different levels. It all started with goals changing over time, went through divergent goals between a project team and stakeholders and ended up with clash between short- and long-term goals. Well, actually it ended up [...]

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The Worst Management Task Ever

September 2, 2011

If you asked me to point a single thing, which I hate most in senior management role, I wouldn’t have any problems with the answer. It would be firing people. On my personal hate scale there’s firing, then huge, huge void and only then other unpleasant things and tasks to do. Each time I fire [...]

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AgileByExample 2011

August 29, 2011

As I started working on my session for AgileByExample 2011 conference I realized I haven’t announced it on the blog yet. Well, it’s high time to fix it. AgileByExample, or #abe2011, is a younger sister of ACE Conference, which I’ve mentioned here a number of times. It doesn’t mean it is organized by the same [...]

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More on Waterfall

August 22, 2011

My recent post on usage of waterfall caused some stir and expectedly so. One of its outcomes was an interesting discussion on Twitter with Markus Andrezak followed by his comment under the post. As I promised to continue discussion on the blog, here is a follow-up. Markus points that there’s no point in resigning from [...]

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Lean Kanban Central Europe 2011 – The Best Kanban Conference Around

August 19, 2011

When I think about different events I attend I tend to value them for different reasons. Let’s take this year. I will definitely put ACE Conference very high because of its ideal size (less than 200 people) in terms of networking. This is kind of ideal size of the crowd to have lots of different [...]

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Waterfall? Sure! Why Not?

August 17, 2011

I heard this sentence today: “This is a classic example of a project where hardcore waterfall would be the best way to go. You know, detailed specs up front and not even a single line of code before the whole thing is formally approved.” A gem. A real gem. I mean seriously. OK, just before [...]

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Kanban: When It Is Hard to Map a Process to a Kanban Board

August 16, 2011

I was asked for an advice the other day: “We have a problem with mapping testing stage into our Kanban board. In ideal world we would test a feature once it is developed, and deploy it on client’s testing environment if and only if every bug we find in the feature is fixed and verified. [...]

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On Making Difficult Decisions

August 11, 2011

Occasionally I receive some flak because of one of decisions I make. Almost always it is one of those decisions which changes status quo. Let’s take an example: an employee has an offer from a competitor. You care about her so you try to keep her offering different things, e.g. transition to a better project, [...]

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Trainers, SMART Goals and Context

August 1, 2011

Every time I’m on some kind of management training I have this vague feeling of disconnection. I mean I do assume a trainer is a competent person who saw way more different work environments than I ever would. They also are trained trainers meaning they know all the tricks how work with a group, what [...]

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