On Product Development and More...

What is the job of the product owner? What does it mean to be an effective agile product owner?

I recently attended an excellent event sponsored by the Silicon Valley Agile Leadership Network, entitled, "The Pains of Agile Transformation".

I was reading a discussion on the Linked In's Agile Transformation and Organizational Change forum on whether the Agile community stop focusing so much on "being Agile" versus "doing Agile".

This led me to ask the following question: What does "doing Agile" really mean?

I just completed reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.

The book chronicles the life of Steve Jobs and his impact of various industries including: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

How do great leaders inspire action? According to Simon Sinek, it starts not by asking What or How, but by asking Why.

I was saddened to learn about the recent death of Eli Goldratt.

Goldratt was a prolific writer, having written two of my favorite management novels, The Goal and Critical Chain. Both of these novels described Goldratt's Theory of Constraints (TOC) management philosophy.

As a consultant in the software industry, I am always looking out for best practices, to help my clients put in place what is needed to build better software products.

A colleague of mine recently shared some best practices adopted by the Software Program Managers Network (or SPMN).

I recently attended a webinar entitled, "Stop Playing Games! Overcoming Politics on Projects" facilitated by Rick Morris, author of Stop Playing Games! A Project Manager's Guide to Successfully Navigating Organizational Politics.

Rick asserts that "project fail because of context, not content" (a concept he learned from reading Radical Project Management, by Rob Thomsett).

I recently attended an online conference sponsored by the IT Metrics & Productivity Institute that focused on improving software development by leveraging best practices and software process improvement theory.

One of the speakers, Bob Charette, a risk management consultant, gave an excellent presentation entitled "Why do Software Projects Fail?”

I recently came across an article in Information Management magazine, entitled "Coaching for Professional Development".

It describes a management philosophy whereby, "Managers should encourage, foster and support employee's continual development as a way of helping them master changing work and keeping morale high". The ultimate goal is to keep employees motivated and productive.

A client recently asked me to provide Microsoft Project training to their organization.

Great, I thought. This is an opportunity to not only present some best practices for using Microsoft Project, but also to introduce some project management best practices into the organization.

Vince Lombardi used to begin every new season with his "Gentlemen, this is a football" speech. He talked about its size and shape, how it can be kicked, carried, or passed.

I first heard the term Death March about 10 years ago. Our principal architect (Ross, one of the brightest engineers I have ever worked with) pulled me aside and said: "Just you watch, Doug. This project will become a Death March. And, it will be your job to guard the exits - preventing us from leaving until our daily toil is done".

I remember the first time I heard this phrase - a mentor of mine at Hewlett-Packard gave me this advice many years ago. He used that along with my other favorite "Denial is not a River in Egypt".

As I previously wrote, MS Project is a really useful tool, particularly, for modeling "what if" scenarios. It's also quite useful for tracking project status.

With that being said, a common complaint that I hear (from project managers, development managers, test leads, etc.), is that the effort required to keep the model up-to-date is too high - particularly in the world of software product development - where change is the order of the day.

It's Fall in the Bay Area. Which means - soccer season. My two kids play in our local AYSO region. And I love watching them play.

In the latest issue of CIO, Michael Friedenberg wrote an article (entitled "The Cost of Data Management") which discusses the challenges facing organizations given the explosion in information.

After being in the technology industry for over 20 years and having worked for a variety of companies both large (including Hewlett-Packard) and small (including several early-stage software startups), I decided to pursue my latest passion - going solo.

Today, I attended a webinar entitled: "An Agile Developer's Guide to Lean Software Development" hosted by Alan Shalloway, from NetObjectives. Shalloway is a noted expert in applying both Agile and Lean methods to Software Development.

Today, I attended a webinar entitled: "We Need it By October: What's Your Estimate?" hosted by Tim Lister, from the Atlantic Systems Guild. Lister is a noted expert in Risk Management, having written a book with Tom DeMarco entitled: "Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects".