Every month I put together my version of the best articles on project management, leadership and team building. Check out the TOP 10 articles on project management in February 2020
Leadership
I Feel Unsafe Here! How to Embrace Conflict
The author of this article raises a problem of avoiding conflicts in the working environment. He is concerned that millenials who constitute the most of today`s workforce are avoiding any slight confrontation with teammates at work hiding behind the so-called “psychological safety”. This situation disrupts team collaboration and makes it ineffective because healthy conflicts are the basis for new ideas, discussions and best solutions. To resolve this author suggest “The Core Protocols” that offer us powerful tools for learning together and applying effective ways to communicate when there’s disagreement [Read More…]
Management
4 Steps to Persuade a Product Owner to Prioritize Refactoring
Teams often struggle to convince their product owners to allow time for code refactoring. This happens because most of the product owners have a mindset of “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it”. However, it is important to dedicate regularly some effort to refactoring in order to prevent bugs in the futute. In this post Mike Cohn shares a four-step framework that teams can use to justify refactoring. The key is in using the language of economic figures, that product owners usually operate [Read More …]
Metrics in Agile: How to Effectively Measure Your Transformation Journey
The Agile framework is becoming an industry standard for software development. It has a number of benefits such as flexibility, transparancy, focus on business value, etc. However, there is one thing that Agile really lacks and it is predictability. The author of this article believes that this is not in issue when you are collecting the proper metrics and doing this in the right way. Here you may find a list of metrics that are really important to measure in order to get an expected result [Read More…]
How To Write A Proper Project Management Plan?
Creating a project management plan may become a non-trivial and stressful task for any project managers, especially for novices. In this article you may find a comprehensible guidance on how to write a simple yet useful project management plan without much stress and time waste [Read More…]
8 Different Ways to Organize Your Backlog to Make it More Impactful
On the most of the projects in which I was involved we had a hard times with organizing a product backlog. It is a challenge to keep order in the backlog while your product is growing and most probably you`ll eventually end up with some mess in it. The author of this articles suggests a solution to this problem which is a non-linear backlog. Find out 8 different ways to structure your backlog to spark your inner creativity and overcome any backlog-blues you may have [Read More…]
Teambuilding
3 Effective Ways New Leaders Can Motivate A Remote Team
Despite the increasing number of remote workers, leaders face great challenges when it comes to managing their virtual teams. Too many managers still don`t know how to manage well regardless of where their staff is located. In this article you find several tips on how you can effectively manage and motivate your remote team [Read More …]
I Asked 2 Million Professionals About Remote Working — Here Are Their Top 13 Hacks
Working remotely is becoming more and more common among today’s professionals. However, when employees are physically and geographically spread out, it becomes more difficult to create a sense of camaraderie and teamwork. In this article the founder of Hootsuite Ryan Holmes shares 13 hacks for building company culture and improving morale in remote team, that he has crowdsourced from his professional network [Read More …]
This Entrepreneur Tried to Build a Business Across 6 Time Zones. Here`s What Happened Next
This article is an interview of Adrian Solgaard, the founder of a travel products company, where he shares his negative experience of building a completely distributed team. Nowadays, when the idea of remote teams is embraced and propagated everywhere, such a revelation may become an eye-opener and a point of concern for many of us. Have you got any idea about what he did wrong? [Read More …]
Scrum
Scrum Infinity Stones
The author of this article creatively describes the main principles of the Scrum framework using the allegory of 6 Infinite Stones from Avenger`s movie. It will help you to understand what are the key pillars that make Scrum framework so powerful and inevitable in an entertaining way [Read More …]
My Team has Nothing to Say in our Retrospective!
I bet that many of Scrum Masters face the situation when their teams are not engaged in Retrospective meetings. Quite often it happens because Scrum Team feels that once nothing is broken and the team is meeting their forecasts, there’s “nothing to talk about. The author of this article argues that this is the approach, caused by so-called Conscious Competence bias. Read the article to get to know how to engage your team in Retrospective if it fell a victim of this bias [Read More …]