Motivation, company philosophy and how to squeeze the juice

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

In every company there should be something that sticks the things together – the identity, that you can feel and taste while browsing the office rooms, listening to the talks at the kitchen, calling the customer support or talking to a manager. The big problem for the employers now is that we are not willing to work for the salary only – we need something more. We have all heard about the research that show that money don’t work when you require some intellectual, creative work. Of course, your employees should be paid good, so they don’t think of money on the first place. Then the company culture, mission understanding and all that stuff comes.

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Offshore Agile – when your PO is far away

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

I am sure this scenario will sound so familiar to you. You have a great agile team and great PO overseas. But he can’t devote much time to the distributed team. Yes, you asked him and he tried. But failed –  he can’t spent so much time on discussing these user stories. The team starts suffering from the lack of understanding. The user stories are not ready for the development – they are not analyzed and communicated properly. If you ever solved the same issue – let’s continue discussion in the post.

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Fun and passion – PM, don’t kill motivation

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

Creating good software is all about passion. No matter how good you are, how good you team members are – if they get up every morning and hardly can convey themselves go to the office – you product will be dead. Or may be it is dead already, so you observe only the post-mortem reflex movements of the dead body…

Who can be happier than the PM, who sees the passion in the eyes of the team members? I think, no one) As a real hedonist I try to find ways to help my teams keep that passion. So, let me present my modest observations results.

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We have no time – the best way to kill your project

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

Everyone is writing unit tests, everyone cares about their tech debt, everyone performs refactoring… Sure! Enter the nearest dev team room and ask them several questions:

  • Do you do TDD?
  • Do you write unit tests?
  • Do you perform refactoring?

And you’ll hear the same I usually do – “No”. And when you ask “Why?” the answer will be “We have no time!”.

I am a cruel PM, one of those guys who keep saying to the teams: “We have no place for that in the budget!”. But it scares even me. So, PMs, stop blaming the teams, it’s your job to protect them and forget about “We have no time!”.

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Why time & materials?

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

It is one of the first questions PM hears from the client. From the client’s side the ideal situation will be: receive the application he desires for the fixed price and fixed time. And no excuses) But is it as simple as the client thinks? I tied to gather the cons of the fixed price projects and pros of time & materials to prove my point of view – either client and developer receive a great benefits if they work on a time&materials contract.

Continue reading Why time & materials?