A common misconception about agile is that managers are unnecessary. After all, agile is based on self-organizing teams. If the teams organize themselves, what do managers do?
Unfortunately, most scrum training plays into that. Think about it: how many trainers or coaches have you seen sketch the structure of a scrum team with a drawing that includes a manager? While there's always a scrum master and a product owner, the core team and maybe some stakeholders, have you ever seen a manager in that drawing?
This misconception can be a problem all around: A frequently cited barrier to agile adoption is managers who don't know what to do when their teams become self-managing. When they're not included in training, how would they (or anyone else, for that matter) know how to characterize their role. At the same time, organizations often lay down expectations of managers, some compatible with agile, some not.
Agile has clearly shifted the old roles and responsibilities. Managers bent on command-and-control are clearly a barrier to agile adoption. But managers who take a hands-off approach or are treading water in a sea of ambiguity will almost certainly stymie adoption, as well.
Ron Lichty believes (and so do a lot of the early agile thought leaders) that managers have critical roles to play in enabling success, both of transitions to agile and of agile itself. This session is about those roles.
If We Are Agile, Why Do We Need Managers? (AgileIndy, 5.14)Ron Lichty
A common misconception about agile is that managers are unnecessary. After all, agile is based on self-organizing teams. If the teams organize themselves, what do managers do?
Unfortunately, most scrum training plays into that. Think about it: how many trainers or coaches have you seen sketch the structure of a scrum team with a drawing that includes a manager? While there's always a scrum master and a product owner, the core team and maybe some stakeholders, have you ever seen a manager in that drawing?
This misconception can be a problem all around: A frequently cited barrier to agile adoption is managers who don't know what to do when their teams become self-managing. When they're not included in training, how would they (or anyone else, for that matter) know how to characterize their role. At the same time, organizations often lay down expectations of managers, some compatible with agile, some not.
Agile has clearly shifted the old roles and responsibilities. Managers bent on command-and-control are clearly a barrier to agile adoption. But managers who take a hands-off approach or are treading water in a sea of ambiguity will almost certainly stymie adoption, as well.
Ron Lichty believes (and so do a lot of the early agile thought leaders) that managers have critical roles to play in enabling success, both of transitions to agile and of agile itself. This session is about those roles.
Keys to crafting an effective agile culture (svcc, 10.15)Ron Lichty
What differentiates a successful software development culture?
Among successful cultures, what makes an agile one stand out?
We think successful software development cultures are ones that are not just performant but that both delight customers and are a joy for every team member to be part of.
One of the characteristics that differentiates agile cultures is that (finally!), it’s not just managers who are responsible for crafting culture - but everyone. And agile, done well, means every one of us engages in the crafting of it.
In addition to training teams in agile, Ron Lichty has spent years coaching managers about how their roles change with agile. While his recent Addison Wesley book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, didn’t zero in on agile, both the book and the classes that he and his coauthor give current and prospective managers espouse a deeply agile mindset for managers.
The hidden ingredient in hyper productive teams (scrummasters guild, 10.15)Ron Lichty
Ron LIchty, author of "Managing the Unmanageable", will explore how shared leadership is often the unspoken ingredient in hyper-productive teams. He will lead participants in activities designed to give a direct experience of sharing leadership and explain how that leads to hyper-productive teams and organizations.
Join us at Cisco in San Jose for an experience that could make everyone around you smarter and wiser.
12 take aways - managing the unmanageableRon Lichty
Silicon Valley Code Camp presentation, October 2013, drawing 12 of the top actionable take-aways for managing programmers and programming teams, from the book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, by Mickey W. Mantle and Ron Lichty.
Product owners - how to get your development team to love you (product tank, ...Ron Lichty
Product managers and product owners can engage and motivate their teams to delight customers - or they can distract and dishearten their teams.
Ron Lichty has been a product manager, a CTO, and a VP leading both development organizations and product teams. As a development leader, he regards product managers who "get it" as key partners.
Here are 16 ways to engage and motivate product teams - and together delight customers!
BIo:
Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers. He believes that strong product/engineering collaboration is essential to achieving that goal. Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels - to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO - at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab, Stanford and Apple. He now consults across that realm, taking on fractional interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles; training teams in agile; training managers in managing software people and teams; and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum. (http://www.ronlichty.com)
Ron has long been a popular speaker at product, development and agile meetups and conferences.
Almost no one on software teams believes in waterfall any longer. That's what we learned from the surveys we took in the course of authoring The 2013 Study of Product Team Performance.
But that doesn't make agile a magic pill.
Mike Cohn notes, "Becoming agile is hard. It is harder than most other organizational change efforts I've witnessed or been part of [for reasons] including the need to change from the top-down and bottom-up simultaneously, the impossibility of knowing exactly what the end state will look like, the dramatic and pervasive changes caused by Scrum, the difficulty adding more change on top of all that is already occurring, and the need to avoid turning Scrum into a list of best practices."
How do we get beyond that?
Glossing over the reality that agile is hard leads us to ignore the very things we need to address to succeed.
On the other hand, acknowledging that agile is hard lets us focus on the challenges that have been preventing us from becoming high performance teams.
This session combines a presentation, a panel and some shared thinking to move beyond how simple agile seems - to what in fact makes agile transformations hard - to how we can face down those challenges to achieve agile's promise.
Expected Takeaways (outcome) for Audience *
For those just starting agile transformations: a heads-up that implementing practices only goes so far.
For those well into agile but struggling, a sense they're not alone.
For all of us, a window into how to get to where we want to go.
Becoming an Agile Manager (bay scrum, 10.24.13)Ron Lichty
A common misconception about agile is that managers are unnecessary. After all, agile is based on self-organizing teams. If the teams organize themselves, what do managers do?
Unfortunately, most scrum training plays into that. Think about it: how many trainers or coaches have you seen sketch the structure of a scrum team with a drawing that includes a manager? While there's always a scrum master and a product owner, the core team and maybe some stakeholders, have you ever seen a manager in that drawing?
This misconception can be a problem all around: A frequently cited barrier to agile adoption is managers who don't know what to do when their teams become self-managing. When they're not included in training, how would they (or anyone else, for that matter) know how to characterize their role. At the same time, organizations often lay down expectations of managers, some compatible with agile, some not.
Agile has clearly shifted the old roles and responsibilities. Managers bent on command-and-control are clearly a barrier to agile adoption. But managers who take a hands-off approach or are treading water in a sea of ambiguity will almost certainly stymie adoption, as well.
Ron Lichty believes (and so do a lot of leading agile thought leaders) that managers have critical roles to play in enabling success, both of transitions to agile and of agile itself. This session is about those roles.
Crash Course: Managing Software People and Teams (IEEE, 4.4.13)Ron Lichty
"We'd like you to manage the team now." That's about as much introduction - and training - as many of us get before our first day managing. Often preceded only by, "You're a great programmer and you've got some people skills." But while programming cred and facility with people are helpful qualifications, what do you really need to know to manage well? What makes a manager great? What are the qualities that meld teams and deliver great software? Those are among the questions that led Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle to write "Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams" (Addison-Wesley, September), now available for pre-order online. In this interactive session, we'll examine the great managers each of us has experienced, and the qualities, skills, finesse and gifts of greatness that made them stand out. We'll talk about "the rest of the job": managing up, managing out, and other aspects of being a seasoned manager that reports mostly don't see. And you'll take away a few best practices that take most managers years to discover.
If We Are Agile, Why Do We Need Managers? (AgileIndy, 5.14)Ron Lichty
A common misconception about agile is that managers are unnecessary. After all, agile is based on self-organizing teams. If the teams organize themselves, what do managers do?
Unfortunately, most scrum training plays into that. Think about it: how many trainers or coaches have you seen sketch the structure of a scrum team with a drawing that includes a manager? While there's always a scrum master and a product owner, the core team and maybe some stakeholders, have you ever seen a manager in that drawing?
This misconception can be a problem all around: A frequently cited barrier to agile adoption is managers who don't know what to do when their teams become self-managing. When they're not included in training, how would they (or anyone else, for that matter) know how to characterize their role. At the same time, organizations often lay down expectations of managers, some compatible with agile, some not.
Agile has clearly shifted the old roles and responsibilities. Managers bent on command-and-control are clearly a barrier to agile adoption. But managers who take a hands-off approach or are treading water in a sea of ambiguity will almost certainly stymie adoption, as well.
Ron Lichty believes (and so do a lot of the early agile thought leaders) that managers have critical roles to play in enabling success, both of transitions to agile and of agile itself. This session is about those roles.
Keys to crafting an effective agile culture (svcc, 10.15)Ron Lichty
What differentiates a successful software development culture?
Among successful cultures, what makes an agile one stand out?
We think successful software development cultures are ones that are not just performant but that both delight customers and are a joy for every team member to be part of.
One of the characteristics that differentiates agile cultures is that (finally!), it’s not just managers who are responsible for crafting culture - but everyone. And agile, done well, means every one of us engages in the crafting of it.
In addition to training teams in agile, Ron Lichty has spent years coaching managers about how their roles change with agile. While his recent Addison Wesley book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, didn’t zero in on agile, both the book and the classes that he and his coauthor give current and prospective managers espouse a deeply agile mindset for managers.
The hidden ingredient in hyper productive teams (scrummasters guild, 10.15)Ron Lichty
Ron LIchty, author of "Managing the Unmanageable", will explore how shared leadership is often the unspoken ingredient in hyper-productive teams. He will lead participants in activities designed to give a direct experience of sharing leadership and explain how that leads to hyper-productive teams and organizations.
Join us at Cisco in San Jose for an experience that could make everyone around you smarter and wiser.
12 take aways - managing the unmanageableRon Lichty
Silicon Valley Code Camp presentation, October 2013, drawing 12 of the top actionable take-aways for managing programmers and programming teams, from the book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, by Mickey W. Mantle and Ron Lichty.
Product owners - how to get your development team to love you (product tank, ...Ron Lichty
Product managers and product owners can engage and motivate their teams to delight customers - or they can distract and dishearten their teams.
Ron Lichty has been a product manager, a CTO, and a VP leading both development organizations and product teams. As a development leader, he regards product managers who "get it" as key partners.
Here are 16 ways to engage and motivate product teams - and together delight customers!
BIo:
Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers. He believes that strong product/engineering collaboration is essential to achieving that goal. Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels - to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO - at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab, Stanford and Apple. He now consults across that realm, taking on fractional interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles; training teams in agile; training managers in managing software people and teams; and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum. (http://www.ronlichty.com)
Ron has long been a popular speaker at product, development and agile meetups and conferences.
Almost no one on software teams believes in waterfall any longer. That's what we learned from the surveys we took in the course of authoring The 2013 Study of Product Team Performance.
But that doesn't make agile a magic pill.
Mike Cohn notes, "Becoming agile is hard. It is harder than most other organizational change efforts I've witnessed or been part of [for reasons] including the need to change from the top-down and bottom-up simultaneously, the impossibility of knowing exactly what the end state will look like, the dramatic and pervasive changes caused by Scrum, the difficulty adding more change on top of all that is already occurring, and the need to avoid turning Scrum into a list of best practices."
How do we get beyond that?
Glossing over the reality that agile is hard leads us to ignore the very things we need to address to succeed.
On the other hand, acknowledging that agile is hard lets us focus on the challenges that have been preventing us from becoming high performance teams.
This session combines a presentation, a panel and some shared thinking to move beyond how simple agile seems - to what in fact makes agile transformations hard - to how we can face down those challenges to achieve agile's promise.
Expected Takeaways (outcome) for Audience *
For those just starting agile transformations: a heads-up that implementing practices only goes so far.
For those well into agile but struggling, a sense they're not alone.
For all of us, a window into how to get to where we want to go.
Becoming an Agile Manager (bay scrum, 10.24.13)Ron Lichty
A common misconception about agile is that managers are unnecessary. After all, agile is based on self-organizing teams. If the teams organize themselves, what do managers do?
Unfortunately, most scrum training plays into that. Think about it: how many trainers or coaches have you seen sketch the structure of a scrum team with a drawing that includes a manager? While there's always a scrum master and a product owner, the core team and maybe some stakeholders, have you ever seen a manager in that drawing?
This misconception can be a problem all around: A frequently cited barrier to agile adoption is managers who don't know what to do when their teams become self-managing. When they're not included in training, how would they (or anyone else, for that matter) know how to characterize their role. At the same time, organizations often lay down expectations of managers, some compatible with agile, some not.
Agile has clearly shifted the old roles and responsibilities. Managers bent on command-and-control are clearly a barrier to agile adoption. But managers who take a hands-off approach or are treading water in a sea of ambiguity will almost certainly stymie adoption, as well.
Ron Lichty believes (and so do a lot of leading agile thought leaders) that managers have critical roles to play in enabling success, both of transitions to agile and of agile itself. This session is about those roles.
Crash Course: Managing Software People and Teams (IEEE, 4.4.13)Ron Lichty
"We'd like you to manage the team now." That's about as much introduction - and training - as many of us get before our first day managing. Often preceded only by, "You're a great programmer and you've got some people skills." But while programming cred and facility with people are helpful qualifications, what do you really need to know to manage well? What makes a manager great? What are the qualities that meld teams and deliver great software? Those are among the questions that led Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle to write "Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams" (Addison-Wesley, September), now available for pre-order online. In this interactive session, we'll examine the great managers each of us has experienced, and the qualities, skills, finesse and gifts of greatness that made them stand out. We'll talk about "the rest of the job": managing up, managing out, and other aspects of being a seasoned manager that reports mostly don't see. And you'll take away a few best practices that take most managers years to discover.
Crash course- managing software people and teamsRon Lichty
"We'd like you to manage the team now." That's about as much introduction - and training - as many of us get before our first day managing. Often preceded only by, "You're a great programmer,” and maybe, “it feels like you've got some people skills.”
But while programming cred and facility with people are helpful qualifications, what do you really need to know to manage well? What makes a manager great? What are the qualities that meld teams and deliver great software? What will make both your programmers and your execs rave? Those are among the questions that led Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle to write "Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams" (Addison-Wesley).
In this interactive session, Ron will examine the great managers each of us has experienced, and the qualities, skills, finesse and gifts of greatness that made them stand out. He'll talk about "the rest of the job": managing up, managing out, and other aspects of being a seasoned manager that reports mostly don't see.
You'll take away a few best practices that take most managers years to discover.
Bio:
Ron Lichty has been managing and, more recently, consulting in software development and product organizations for over 25 years at companies like Apple, Fujitsu, Schwab, Razorfish, Forensic Logic, Stanford, Check Point, and dozens of startups of all sizes. Before that, as a programmer, he coded compiler code generators, was awarded patents for compression and security algorithms for embedded microcontroller devices, wrote two widely used programming texts, and developed the computer animation demo that Apple used to launch and sell a next-generation line of PCs. He has mostly managed development teams and organizations, but also product managers, project managers, testers, designers, … pretty much everyone on product teams. The primary focus of his consulting practice, these last four years, has mirrored what he did as a manager: untangling the knots in software development. His career has spanned web applications, system software, entertainment, shrinkwrap products, ecommerce, interface development, embedded devices, professional services and IT - and grew from first level managing to VP Engineering, VP Product and CTO roles.
As Ron Lichty Consulting, he takes on fractional Interim VP Engineering and Acting CTO roles, trains teams in scrum, transitions teams to agile, trains managers in managing software people and teams, and coaches teams to make their software development “hum.” http://www.ronlichty.com
His 450-page book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net), published by Addison Wesley, has been compared by many readers to programming classics The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. He also co-authors the biannual Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Five techniques that can make our teamwork and our teams dramatically more effective. Nonetheless, they're nuances I almost never see teams doing (and that have made my own teams much more effective).
I'm an engineering-team and engineering-organization fire-jumper. This is stuff that works for me.
I've not only seen these techniques work with my teams, but... I'm also the co-author of the Study of Product Team Performance, in which correlations from the thousands of respondents on product teams all over the world have validated the universality of the nuances of two of these techniques.
I've been teaching and coaching managers and teams in all five for 15 years. It's time they get wider visibility, and a wider swath of teams and managers get a shot at leveraging them.
Presenter Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers. He believes that strong product/engineering collaboration is essential to achieving that goal. Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels - at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab, Stanford and Apple - to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO.
He now consults across that realm, taking on interim VP Engineering roles, advising executive leaders how to untangle the knots in their product development organizations, training teams in agile, training managers in managing software people and teams, and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum. (http://www.ronlichty.com)
Ron has long been a popular speaker at product, development and agile meetups and conferences. Ron@RonLichty.com
Teamwork - making your dream team come trueRon Lichty
Agile Iowa 10.16, Silicon Valley Agile Trends & Leadership 4.17
What differentiates a successful software development culture?
Almost all of us have been on a high performance team. Just invite us, and we’ll sign up for another in a second! Typically, it was a team for which we worked harder - but from which we took away more exhilaration and joy than at any other time in our careers. What made it so? And what can we do to get it again?
We think successful software development cultures are ones that are not just performant but that both delight customers and are a joy for every team member to be part of.
One of the characteristics that differentiates agile cultures is that (finally!), it’s not just managers who are responsible for crafting culture - but everyone. And agile, done well, means every one of us engages in the crafting of it.
But agile asks people who are often introverted, highly-logical, independent thinkers not only to form teams but to make those teams self-organizing. It asks every team member to step up and collaborate.
Agile offers each of us the promise of a stellar team experience – provided we and every one of our peers steps up to make it so. We need to no longer just perform as individuals, but truly trust and respect and engage and share - behaviors that can feel at odds with the fierce independence that got us through school and into industry.
Speaker
Ron Lichty
In addition to training teams in agile, Ron Lichty has spent years coaching managers about how their roles change with agile. While his recent Addison Wesley book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) didn’t zero in on agile, both the book and the classes that he and his coauthor give current and prospective managers espouse a deeply agile mindset for managers. He also coauthors the annual Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Product Owners - How to get your development team to love you (ProductTankSV,...Ron Lichty
Product managers and product owners can engage and motivate their teams to delight customers - or they can distract and dishearten their teams.
Ron Lichty has been a product manager, a CTO, and a VP leading both development organizations and product teams. As a development leader, he regards product managers who "get it" as key partners.
Here are 16 ways to engage and motivate product teams - to ensure that together that you delight customers!
Points to take away:
▪ Delighting customers is the metric to which we should manage
▪ Delighting customers relies on tight collaboration between product managers, product owners, and development teams
▪ Product managers and development leaders are uniquely positioned to, together, motivate product teams
▪ Product managers and product owners are uniquely positioned to connect the dots
BIo:
Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers. He believes that strong product/engineering collaboration is essential to achieving that goal. Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels - to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO - at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab, Stanford and Apple.
He now consults across that realm, taking on fractional interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles, training teams in agile, training managers in managing software people and teams, and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum. (http://www.ronlichty.com)
Ron has long been a popular speaker at product, development and agile meetups and conferences.
Ask any scrum coach about ideal team size and you’ll likely get the same answer: 7 plus or minus 2: that is, 5 to 9 team members doing the actual planning and work of the sprint.
But is that true?
And if it is, what do we do when we think we need to add a 10th team member to an already-maxed-out, 9-member team?
Splitting into two (or three!) teams seems fractious - siloing - so why would we cap teams at nine and split them at 10?
And what do we do when part of our team is local and part remote? Or when our entire team is scattered? How do we organize for best results?
Ron Lichty’s mantra is that software development is a team sport, which means that what gates productivity is communication. In this webinar, he’ll speak to organizing teams for effectiveness, productivity and joy.
Ron Lichty consults with software and product teams and organizations to make software development “hum”. Ron’s book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net), published by Addison Wesley, has been compared by many readers to programming classics The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. His Live Lessons: Managing Software People and Teams video training for managers is available via O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf. Ron also co-authors the periodic Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc. (www.RonLichty.com), he has trained teams in Scrum, transitioned teams from waterfall to agile, coached teams already using agile to make their software development "hum", and trained managers in managing software people and teams. He takes on interim VP Engineering roles and to other clients provides VPE-level guidance and advice to untangle the knots in software development and transform chaos to clarity.
He has led teams and organizations at companies like Apple Computer, Fujitsu, Charles Schwab, Avenue A / Razorfish, Forensic Logic, Stanford, Check Point, and dozens of startups of all sizes. He co-chairs the Silicon Valley Engineering Leadership Community.
Managing programmers is hard! Becoming a successful manager requires a drastic change of focus.
The transition from programmer to manager is made particularly challenging by the dramatic difference between what made us successful as programmers and what it takes to successfully manage others. In addition, programmers are an interesting management challenge. We tend to be free spirits, playful, curious, and (very) independent.
What’s management really about? What differentiates success as a manager? What's it mean to manage in the era of agile? How do you prioritize? What constitutes great management?
Presenter is Ron Lichty, who co-authored the Addison-Wesley tutorial and reference, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams - http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net. Compared by reviewers to software development classics, The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware, the content is now also available as video training, LiveLessons: Managing Software People and Teams, http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net/video.html. Ron aspires to make software development better worldwide by advancing the practice of software development management.
Ron has been alternating between consulting with and managing software development and product organizations for 25 years, almost all of those spent untangling the knots in software development and transforming chaos to clarity, the last 20 of those in the era of Agile. Originally a programmer, he earned several patents and wrote two popular programming books before being hired into his first management role by Apple Computer, which nurtured his managerial growth in both development and product management roles.
Principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc. (www.RonLichty.com), Ron advises business, product and engineering leaders to solve development team challenges, taking on an occasional interim vice president of engineering role, and training teams and executives in making agile more effective. He transitions teams from waterfall and iterative methodologies to agile, coaches teams already using agile to make their software development "hum", and trains managers in managing software people and teams. In his continued search for effective best practices, Ron co-authors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
12 Take Aways - Managing the UnmanageableRon Lichty
Twelve Take Aways: Managing the Unmanageable. We'll look at 12 best practices that make programming managers great but take most managers years to discover. Expect an interactive session.
About 95 percent of programming managers had no management training before being tapped to manage. Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle, both former programmers, didn't either.
About half of managers never get any training in managing. Ron and Mickey were lucky enough to work for companies like Apple and Pixar that provided some general management training. But little to none of it was specific to managing programmers, or to managing programming teams.
The struggle to manage programmers and programming teams motivated years of weekend breakfasts for Ron and Mickey, during which they traded insights - on the challenges they faced - and solutions they had used and seen - the kinds of stuff they’d wished they'd had when they started managing.
Sharing insights and best practices with each other for a decade led them to realize they wanted to share what they had learned. And that led to spending eight years of free time writing their Addison Wesley book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net. To their own hard-won experience, they added the best of the treasure troves they'd each collected of rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom from their peers and programming manager thought leaders around the world.
Reviewers have repeatedly compared Managing the Unmanageable to The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware, the classics on software development challenges.
About Ron:
Ron Lichty has been managing and, more recently, consulting in managing software development and product organizations for over 25 years at companies like Apple Computer, Fujitsu, Charles Schwab, Avenue A | Razorfish, Forensic Logic, Stanford, Check Point, MediaBrands, and dozens of startups of all sizes. Before that, as a programmer, he coded compiler code generators, was awarded patents for compression and security algorithms he designed and coded for embedded microcontroller devices, wrote two widely used programming texts, and developed the computer animation demo that Apple used to launch and sell a next-generation line of PCs. He has mostly managed development teams and organizations, but also product managers, project managers, testers, designers, … pretty much everyone on product teams.
The primary focus of his consulting practice, these last 5 years, has mirrored what he did as a manager: untangling the knots in software development. His career grew to VP Eng, VP Product and CTO roles.
As Ron Lichty Consulting, he takes on fractional Interim VPE roles, trains teams in scrum, transitions teams to agile, trains managers in managing software people and teams, and advises organizations and coaches teams to make their software development “hum.” http://www.ronlichty
Product owners - how to get your development team to love you (product school...Ron Lichty
Product managers and product owners can engage and motivate their teams to delight customers - or they can distract and dishearten their teams.
Ron Lichty has been a product manager, a CTO, and a VP leading both development organizations and product teams. As a development leader, he regards product managers who "get it" as key partners.
Here are 16 ways to engage and motivate product teams - to ensure that together that you delight customers!
BIo:
Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers. He believes that strong product/engineering collaboration is essential to achieving that goal. Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels - to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO - at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab,Stanford, and Apple.
He now consults across that realm, taking on fractional interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles, training teams in agile, training managers in managing software people and teams, and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum. (http://www.ronlichty.com)
Ron has long been a popular speaker at product, development and agile meetups and conferences. Ron@RonLichty.com
Ict educators win-win-win w agile, ron lichty, 1.4.13Ron Lichty
"Delivering a Win-Win-Win Workforce with Agile Programming Methods", presentation to the 2013 Winter ICT Educator conference in San Francisco January 4, 2013.
Dream teams - making your dream (team) come trueRon Lichty
What differentiates a successful software development culture? What differentiates high performance teams?
Almost all of us have been on a high performance team. Typically, it was a team for which we worked harder - but from which we took away more exhilaration and joy - than any other team in our careers.
What made it so? And what can we do to get it again?
Successful software development cultures are ones that are not just performant but that also delight customers and are a joy for every team member to be part of.
One of the characteristics that differentiates agile cultures is that (finally!) it’s not just managers who are responsible for crafting culture - but everyone. Yes, every one of the various kinds of managers engaged with product and project teams have a role in crafting culture and supporting the emergence of high performance teams. But agile, done well, means every one of us engages in crafting it.
Ultimately, stellar team experiences derive from us. We need to truly trust and respect and engage and share - behaviors that can feel at odds with the fierce independence from whence we’ve come.
How can people who are often introverted, highly-logical, independent thinkers not only form teams but make those teams self-organizing and high-performance? What’s the role of leaders in crafting culture that supports emergence of high performance teams? What can we all do to be part of a high performance team once again? How do we make our dream teams come true?
Takeaways / Lessons to be learned:
▪ What constitutes and characterizes a dream team?
▪ What’s the connection between agile teams and dream teams?
▪ What differentiates great agile teams from mediocre ones?
▪ What’s the role of managers, product managers, product owners, program managers and scrum masters in fostering dream teams?
▪ What’s the role of team members in fostering dream teams?
▪ Take away what you can do to transform your team to a dream team.
Talk delivered to Agile Iowa, Silicon Valley Code Camp, San Mateo Scrum Professionals, Silicon Valley Agile Camp, Eastern Iowa Agile, and Silicon Valley Agile Trends & Leadership
Speaker:
Ron Lichty
In addition to training teams in scrum, taking on interim VP Engineering roles, and advising organizations and coaching teams to make their software development "hum", Ron Lichty mentors managers about how their roles change with agile. While his recent Addison Wesley book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) didn’t zero in on agile, both the book and the classes that he and his coauthor give current and prospective managers espouse a deeply agile mindset for managers. He also coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html). His book was recently released as video training, http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net/video.html
Definitions of Done and High Performance TeamsRon Lichty
What’s the most powerful practice in Agile? My candidate: a team-crafted, team-owned definition of done.
Our research findings: product teams are most effective when they have a definition of done defined by the team itself collaboratively.
Might the practice of crafting a definition of done – before writing a single line of code – be the most powerful practice in Agile? Or does having a definition of done matter? What is the correlation between Definitions of Done and high performance teams?
Thousands of people on product teams all over the world respond to our survey for the Study of Product Team Performance. We asked them.
Here's what the data shows.
Presented November 2018 to the Silicon Valley Engineering Leadership Community, and January 2017 to the Silicon Valley Agile Trends & Leadership.
Speaker:
Ron Lichty
In addition to training teams in agile, Ron Lichty has spent years coaching managers about how their roles change with agile. While his recent Addison Wesley book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) didn’t zero in on agile, both the book and the classes that he and his coauthor give current and prospective managers espouse a deeply agile mindset for managers. He also coauthors the annual Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
The primary focus of his consulting practice, these last five years, has mirrored what he did as a manager: untangling the knots in software development. His career has spanned web applications, system software, entertainment, shrinkwrap products, ecommerce, interface development, embedded devices, professional services and IT - and grew from first level managing to VP Engineering, VP Product and CTO roles.
As Ron Lichty Consulting, he takes on fractional Interim VP Engineering roles, trains teams in scrum, transitions teams to agile, trains managers in managing software people and teams, and advises organizations to make their software development “hum.” http://www.ronlichty.com
Managing the Unmanageable was recently released as video training - LiveLessons: Managing Software People and Teams - both from Pearson and on O’Reilly’s Safari Network (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net/video.html).
Transforming chaos to clarity - acm 6.15Ron Lichty
Does your software development feel chaotic?
If you have ever been dissatisfied with your software development flow - if you would like to figure out how to avoid chaos - this is a presentation for you!
Ron Lichty has found himself repeatedly called in as the cavalry to help development groups stuck in confusion. A recognized engineering leader, Ron says, “I've found that I excel at coming in cold, identifying the causes of chaos, untangling organizational knots, creating roadmaps everyone can follow, building communications with other parts of the organization, and getting teams productive and focused on delivery, quality and customers.” He adds, “With a few pointers, any team member can more deeply diagnose their team.”
Ron is author of Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, which has been compared by reviewers to Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month. After managing software and product organizations for 25 years, Ron has catered his leadership roles to the needs of his clients, including interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles.
Six years ago, Ron began training teams in agile and a year ago training managers in the nuances of managing software people and teams, whether in waterfall environments, or iterative or agile ones.
If you would like to become an effective agile team member then you'll want to attend this presentation. We’ll look at agile trends, software team pain points, product team solutions, and how every team member contributes to making teams excel.
Drawing from his experience with dozens of product development organizations, Ron will walk through the steps needed to assess your organization’s workings and pull together the elements that will bring order and increased productivity for your business.
Bio:
Ron Lichty has been managing and more recently consulting with software development and product organizations for over 25 years, engaged in untangling the knots in software development and transforming chaos to clarity. Originally a programmer, where he earned several patents and wrote two popular programming books, he was hired into his first management role by Apple Computer, which nurtured his managerial growth in both development and product management.
Principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc. (www.RonLichty.com), he has trained teams in scrum, transitioned teams from waterfall and iterative methodologies to agile, and coached teams using agile, iterative and waterfall approaches alike to make their software development "hum". In his continued search for effective best practices, Ron co-authors the annual Study of Product Team Performance.
Ron's most recent book is Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams - http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net - co-authored with CTO Mickey W. Mantle. Published by Addison Wesley, it has been compared by reviewers to Mythica
Crash Course - managing software people and teams (sfelc, 10.26.16)Ron Lichty
"We'd like you to manage the team now." That's about as much introduction - and training - as many of us get before our first day managing. Often preceded only by, "You're a great programmer,” and maybe, “it feels like you've got some people skills.”
But while programming cred and facility with people are helpful qualifications, what do you really need to know to manage well? What makes a manager great? What are the qualities that meld teams and deliver great software? What will make both your programmers and your execs rave? Those are among the questions that led Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle to write "Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams" (Addison-Wesley).
In this interactive session, Ron will examine the great managers each of us has experienced, and the qualities, skills, finesse and gifts of greatness that made them stand out. He'll talk about "the rest of the job": managing up, managing out, and other aspects of being a seasoned manager that reports mostly don't see.
You'll take away a few best practices that take most managers years to discover.
Do you want to be a manager (are you sure)Ron Lichty
Managing programmers is hard! Becoming a successful manager requires a drastic change of focus. There are expectations to consider before making a leap to the “dark side.”
The transition from programmer to manager is made particularly challenging by the dramatic difference between what made us successful as programmers and what it takes to successfully manage others. In addition, programmers are an interesting management challenge.
We tend to be free spirits, playful, curious, and (very) independent.
How can you ease the transition into management? What’s management really about? What will you give up?
Bio:
Ron Lichty wants to make software development better worldwide by advancing the practice of software development management. He has been alternating between consulting with and managing software development and product organizations for 25 years, almost all of those spent untangling the knots in software development and transforming chaos to clarity, the last 20 of those in the era of Agile. Originally a programmer, he earned several patents and wrote two popular programming books before being hired into his first management role by Apple Computer, which nurtured his managerial growth in both development and product management roles.
Principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc. (www.RonLichty.com), Ron has repeatedly been brought in as an acting CTO and interim vice president of engineering to solve development team challenges. He has trained teams in Scrum, transitioned teams from waterfall and iterative methodologies to agile, coached teams already using agile to make their software development "hum", and trained managers in managing software people and teams. In his continued search for effective best practices, Ron co-authors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron's most recent book is Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams - http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net. Published by Addison Wesley as both book and video training, it has been compared by reviewers to software development classics, The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware.
During Ron's first three years at Charles Schwab, he led software development of the first investor tools on Schwab.com, playing a role in transforming the bricks-and-mortar discount brokerage into a premier name in online financial services. He was promoted to Schwab vice president while leading his CIO’s three-year technology initiative to migrate software development from any-language-goes to a single, cost-effective platform company-wide and nurturing Schwab's nascent efforts to leverage early Agile approaches. He has led products and development across a wide range of domains for companies of all sizes, from startups to the Fortune 500, including Fujitsu, Razorfish, Stanford, and Apple.
Ron co-chairs the Silicon Valley Engineering Leadership Community.
AIPMM talk - chaos to clarity: managing the unmanageable, ron lichty, 12.7.12Ron Lichty
Good software management:
⁃ How to recognize it when you see it
⁃ How to encourage it
⁃ How to encourage senior management to encourage it
⁃ How to collaborate with it effectively
What does good software development management look like?
How do good programming managers motivate their teams?
What are programming managers bedeviled by?
How are programming managers tormented by product managers?
What are the forces that cause discord between product and software development managers?
What can be done about feature creep and late changing requirements?
Why do so many parts of organizations expect feature requirements to change but not delivery schedules?
What are objectives shared between programming managers and product managers that could encourage collaboration?
What would happen if programming managers and product managers formed mutual admiration societies with each other?
Crash Course - Managing Software People and TeamsRon Lichty
"We'd like you to manage the team now." That's about as much introduction - and training - as many of us get before our first day managing. Often preceded only by, "You're a great programmer,” and maybe, “it feels like you've got some people skills.”
But while programming cred and facility with people are helpful qualifications, what do you really need to know to manage and lead well? What makes a manager great? What are the qualities that meld teams and deliver great software? What will make both your programmers and your execs rave? Those are among the questions that led Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle to write "Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams" (Addison-Wesley).
In this interactive session, Ron will examine the great managers each of us has experienced, and the qualities, skills, finesse and gifts of greatness that made them stand out. He'll talk about "the rest of the job": managing up, managing out, and other aspects of being a seasoned manager that reports mostly don't see.
You'll take away a few best practices of leading and managing that take most managers years to discover.
BIO: Ron Lichty
Ron Lichty has been managing and, more recently, consulting in software development and product organizations for over 30 years at companies like Apple, Fujitsu, Schwab, Razorfish, Forensic Logic, Stanford, Check Point, and dozens of startups of all sizes. Before that, as a programmer, he coded compiler code generators, was awarded patents for compression and security algorithms he designed and coded for embedded microcontroller devices, wrote two widely used programming texts, and developed the computer animation demo that Apple used to launch and sell a next-generation line of PCs.
Ron has mostly led development teams and organizations, but also product managers, project managers, testers, designers, ... pretty much everyone on product teams. The primary focus of his consulting practice, these last eight years, has mirrored what he did as a manager: untangling the knots in software development. His career grew from first level manager to VP Engineering, VP Product and CTO roles.
As Ron Lichty Consulting, he takes on fractional Interim VP Engineering roles, trains teams in scrum, transitions teams to agile, trains managers in managing software people and teams, and coaches teams to make their software development “hum.” http://www.ronlichty.com
Addison Wesley recently released the 2nd edition of his fifth book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net), compared by many readers to programming classics The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. He also co-authors the periodic Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Leading and Motivating Engineers - what product managers need to know - prod...Ron Lichty
Effective, experienced technical product management is crucial to make software development hum: Engineering and Product Management are symbiotic. Product managers lead and motivate by first establishing credibility with engineers, and by bringing vision, data, collaboration, prioritization, and protection. Ron Lichty has repeatedly been brought in to transform chaos to clarity in software development. Here’s what product managers can apply to lead and motivate engineers and make software development hum.
BIo:
Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers. He believes that strong product/engineering collaboration is essential to achieving that goal. Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels - to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO - at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab,Stanford, and Apple.
He now consults across that realm, taking on fractional interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles, training teams in agile, training managers in managing software people and teams, and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum. (http://www.ronlichty.com)
Ron has long been a popular speaker at product, development and agile meetups and conferences. Ron@RonLichty.com
12 Take Aways - Managing the UnmanageableRon Lichty
His 450-page book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net), published by Addison Wesley, has been compared by many readers to programming classics The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. It was recently released as video training - LiveLessons: Managing Software People and Teams - both from Pearson and on O’Reilly’s Safari Network (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net/video.html). He also co-authors the biannual Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Crash course- managing software people and teamsRon Lichty
"We'd like you to manage the team now." That's about as much introduction - and training - as many of us get before our first day managing. Often preceded only by, "You're a great programmer,” and maybe, “it feels like you've got some people skills.”
But while programming cred and facility with people are helpful qualifications, what do you really need to know to manage well? What makes a manager great? What are the qualities that meld teams and deliver great software? What will make both your programmers and your execs rave? Those are among the questions that led Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle to write "Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams" (Addison-Wesley).
In this interactive session, Ron will examine the great managers each of us has experienced, and the qualities, skills, finesse and gifts of greatness that made them stand out. He'll talk about "the rest of the job": managing up, managing out, and other aspects of being a seasoned manager that reports mostly don't see.
You'll take away a few best practices that take most managers years to discover.
Bio:
Ron Lichty has been managing and, more recently, consulting in software development and product organizations for over 25 years at companies like Apple, Fujitsu, Schwab, Razorfish, Forensic Logic, Stanford, Check Point, and dozens of startups of all sizes. Before that, as a programmer, he coded compiler code generators, was awarded patents for compression and security algorithms for embedded microcontroller devices, wrote two widely used programming texts, and developed the computer animation demo that Apple used to launch and sell a next-generation line of PCs. He has mostly managed development teams and organizations, but also product managers, project managers, testers, designers, … pretty much everyone on product teams. The primary focus of his consulting practice, these last four years, has mirrored what he did as a manager: untangling the knots in software development. His career has spanned web applications, system software, entertainment, shrinkwrap products, ecommerce, interface development, embedded devices, professional services and IT - and grew from first level managing to VP Engineering, VP Product and CTO roles.
As Ron Lichty Consulting, he takes on fractional Interim VP Engineering and Acting CTO roles, trains teams in scrum, transitions teams to agile, trains managers in managing software people and teams, and coaches teams to make their software development “hum.” http://www.ronlichty.com
His 450-page book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net), published by Addison Wesley, has been compared by many readers to programming classics The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. He also co-authors the biannual Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Five techniques that can make our teamwork and our teams dramatically more effective. Nonetheless, they're nuances I almost never see teams doing (and that have made my own teams much more effective).
I'm an engineering-team and engineering-organization fire-jumper. This is stuff that works for me.
I've not only seen these techniques work with my teams, but... I'm also the co-author of the Study of Product Team Performance, in which correlations from the thousands of respondents on product teams all over the world have validated the universality of the nuances of two of these techniques.
I've been teaching and coaching managers and teams in all five for 15 years. It's time they get wider visibility, and a wider swath of teams and managers get a shot at leveraging them.
Presenter Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers. He believes that strong product/engineering collaboration is essential to achieving that goal. Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels - at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab, Stanford and Apple - to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO.
He now consults across that realm, taking on interim VP Engineering roles, advising executive leaders how to untangle the knots in their product development organizations, training teams in agile, training managers in managing software people and teams, and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum. (http://www.ronlichty.com)
Ron has long been a popular speaker at product, development and agile meetups and conferences. Ron@RonLichty.com
Teamwork - making your dream team come trueRon Lichty
Agile Iowa 10.16, Silicon Valley Agile Trends & Leadership 4.17
What differentiates a successful software development culture?
Almost all of us have been on a high performance team. Just invite us, and we’ll sign up for another in a second! Typically, it was a team for which we worked harder - but from which we took away more exhilaration and joy than at any other time in our careers. What made it so? And what can we do to get it again?
We think successful software development cultures are ones that are not just performant but that both delight customers and are a joy for every team member to be part of.
One of the characteristics that differentiates agile cultures is that (finally!), it’s not just managers who are responsible for crafting culture - but everyone. And agile, done well, means every one of us engages in the crafting of it.
But agile asks people who are often introverted, highly-logical, independent thinkers not only to form teams but to make those teams self-organizing. It asks every team member to step up and collaborate.
Agile offers each of us the promise of a stellar team experience – provided we and every one of our peers steps up to make it so. We need to no longer just perform as individuals, but truly trust and respect and engage and share - behaviors that can feel at odds with the fierce independence that got us through school and into industry.
Speaker
Ron Lichty
In addition to training teams in agile, Ron Lichty has spent years coaching managers about how their roles change with agile. While his recent Addison Wesley book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) didn’t zero in on agile, both the book and the classes that he and his coauthor give current and prospective managers espouse a deeply agile mindset for managers. He also coauthors the annual Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Product Owners - How to get your development team to love you (ProductTankSV,...Ron Lichty
Product managers and product owners can engage and motivate their teams to delight customers - or they can distract and dishearten their teams.
Ron Lichty has been a product manager, a CTO, and a VP leading both development organizations and product teams. As a development leader, he regards product managers who "get it" as key partners.
Here are 16 ways to engage and motivate product teams - to ensure that together that you delight customers!
Points to take away:
▪ Delighting customers is the metric to which we should manage
▪ Delighting customers relies on tight collaboration between product managers, product owners, and development teams
▪ Product managers and development leaders are uniquely positioned to, together, motivate product teams
▪ Product managers and product owners are uniquely positioned to connect the dots
BIo:
Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers. He believes that strong product/engineering collaboration is essential to achieving that goal. Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels - to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO - at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab, Stanford and Apple.
He now consults across that realm, taking on fractional interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles, training teams in agile, training managers in managing software people and teams, and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum. (http://www.ronlichty.com)
Ron has long been a popular speaker at product, development and agile meetups and conferences.
Ask any scrum coach about ideal team size and you’ll likely get the same answer: 7 plus or minus 2: that is, 5 to 9 team members doing the actual planning and work of the sprint.
But is that true?
And if it is, what do we do when we think we need to add a 10th team member to an already-maxed-out, 9-member team?
Splitting into two (or three!) teams seems fractious - siloing - so why would we cap teams at nine and split them at 10?
And what do we do when part of our team is local and part remote? Or when our entire team is scattered? How do we organize for best results?
Ron Lichty’s mantra is that software development is a team sport, which means that what gates productivity is communication. In this webinar, he’ll speak to organizing teams for effectiveness, productivity and joy.
Ron Lichty consults with software and product teams and organizations to make software development “hum”. Ron’s book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net), published by Addison Wesley, has been compared by many readers to programming classics The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. His Live Lessons: Managing Software People and Teams video training for managers is available via O’Reilly’s Safari Bookshelf. Ron also co-authors the periodic Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc. (www.RonLichty.com), he has trained teams in Scrum, transitioned teams from waterfall to agile, coached teams already using agile to make their software development "hum", and trained managers in managing software people and teams. He takes on interim VP Engineering roles and to other clients provides VPE-level guidance and advice to untangle the knots in software development and transform chaos to clarity.
He has led teams and organizations at companies like Apple Computer, Fujitsu, Charles Schwab, Avenue A / Razorfish, Forensic Logic, Stanford, Check Point, and dozens of startups of all sizes. He co-chairs the Silicon Valley Engineering Leadership Community.
Managing programmers is hard! Becoming a successful manager requires a drastic change of focus.
The transition from programmer to manager is made particularly challenging by the dramatic difference between what made us successful as programmers and what it takes to successfully manage others. In addition, programmers are an interesting management challenge. We tend to be free spirits, playful, curious, and (very) independent.
What’s management really about? What differentiates success as a manager? What's it mean to manage in the era of agile? How do you prioritize? What constitutes great management?
Presenter is Ron Lichty, who co-authored the Addison-Wesley tutorial and reference, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams - http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net. Compared by reviewers to software development classics, The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware, the content is now also available as video training, LiveLessons: Managing Software People and Teams, http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net/video.html. Ron aspires to make software development better worldwide by advancing the practice of software development management.
Ron has been alternating between consulting with and managing software development and product organizations for 25 years, almost all of those spent untangling the knots in software development and transforming chaos to clarity, the last 20 of those in the era of Agile. Originally a programmer, he earned several patents and wrote two popular programming books before being hired into his first management role by Apple Computer, which nurtured his managerial growth in both development and product management roles.
Principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc. (www.RonLichty.com), Ron advises business, product and engineering leaders to solve development team challenges, taking on an occasional interim vice president of engineering role, and training teams and executives in making agile more effective. He transitions teams from waterfall and iterative methodologies to agile, coaches teams already using agile to make their software development "hum", and trains managers in managing software people and teams. In his continued search for effective best practices, Ron co-authors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
12 Take Aways - Managing the UnmanageableRon Lichty
Twelve Take Aways: Managing the Unmanageable. We'll look at 12 best practices that make programming managers great but take most managers years to discover. Expect an interactive session.
About 95 percent of programming managers had no management training before being tapped to manage. Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle, both former programmers, didn't either.
About half of managers never get any training in managing. Ron and Mickey were lucky enough to work for companies like Apple and Pixar that provided some general management training. But little to none of it was specific to managing programmers, or to managing programming teams.
The struggle to manage programmers and programming teams motivated years of weekend breakfasts for Ron and Mickey, during which they traded insights - on the challenges they faced - and solutions they had used and seen - the kinds of stuff they’d wished they'd had when they started managing.
Sharing insights and best practices with each other for a decade led them to realize they wanted to share what they had learned. And that led to spending eight years of free time writing their Addison Wesley book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net. To their own hard-won experience, they added the best of the treasure troves they'd each collected of rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom from their peers and programming manager thought leaders around the world.
Reviewers have repeatedly compared Managing the Unmanageable to The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware, the classics on software development challenges.
About Ron:
Ron Lichty has been managing and, more recently, consulting in managing software development and product organizations for over 25 years at companies like Apple Computer, Fujitsu, Charles Schwab, Avenue A | Razorfish, Forensic Logic, Stanford, Check Point, MediaBrands, and dozens of startups of all sizes. Before that, as a programmer, he coded compiler code generators, was awarded patents for compression and security algorithms he designed and coded for embedded microcontroller devices, wrote two widely used programming texts, and developed the computer animation demo that Apple used to launch and sell a next-generation line of PCs. He has mostly managed development teams and organizations, but also product managers, project managers, testers, designers, … pretty much everyone on product teams.
The primary focus of his consulting practice, these last 5 years, has mirrored what he did as a manager: untangling the knots in software development. His career grew to VP Eng, VP Product and CTO roles.
As Ron Lichty Consulting, he takes on fractional Interim VPE roles, trains teams in scrum, transitions teams to agile, trains managers in managing software people and teams, and advises organizations and coaches teams to make their software development “hum.” http://www.ronlichty
Product owners - how to get your development team to love you (product school...Ron Lichty
Product managers and product owners can engage and motivate their teams to delight customers - or they can distract and dishearten their teams.
Ron Lichty has been a product manager, a CTO, and a VP leading both development organizations and product teams. As a development leader, he regards product managers who "get it" as key partners.
Here are 16 ways to engage and motivate product teams - to ensure that together that you delight customers!
BIo:
Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers. He believes that strong product/engineering collaboration is essential to achieving that goal. Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels - to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO - at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab,Stanford, and Apple.
He now consults across that realm, taking on fractional interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles, training teams in agile, training managers in managing software people and teams, and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum. (http://www.ronlichty.com)
Ron has long been a popular speaker at product, development and agile meetups and conferences. Ron@RonLichty.com
Ict educators win-win-win w agile, ron lichty, 1.4.13Ron Lichty
"Delivering a Win-Win-Win Workforce with Agile Programming Methods", presentation to the 2013 Winter ICT Educator conference in San Francisco January 4, 2013.
Dream teams - making your dream (team) come trueRon Lichty
What differentiates a successful software development culture? What differentiates high performance teams?
Almost all of us have been on a high performance team. Typically, it was a team for which we worked harder - but from which we took away more exhilaration and joy - than any other team in our careers.
What made it so? And what can we do to get it again?
Successful software development cultures are ones that are not just performant but that also delight customers and are a joy for every team member to be part of.
One of the characteristics that differentiates agile cultures is that (finally!) it’s not just managers who are responsible for crafting culture - but everyone. Yes, every one of the various kinds of managers engaged with product and project teams have a role in crafting culture and supporting the emergence of high performance teams. But agile, done well, means every one of us engages in crafting it.
Ultimately, stellar team experiences derive from us. We need to truly trust and respect and engage and share - behaviors that can feel at odds with the fierce independence from whence we’ve come.
How can people who are often introverted, highly-logical, independent thinkers not only form teams but make those teams self-organizing and high-performance? What’s the role of leaders in crafting culture that supports emergence of high performance teams? What can we all do to be part of a high performance team once again? How do we make our dream teams come true?
Takeaways / Lessons to be learned:
▪ What constitutes and characterizes a dream team?
▪ What’s the connection between agile teams and dream teams?
▪ What differentiates great agile teams from mediocre ones?
▪ What’s the role of managers, product managers, product owners, program managers and scrum masters in fostering dream teams?
▪ What’s the role of team members in fostering dream teams?
▪ Take away what you can do to transform your team to a dream team.
Talk delivered to Agile Iowa, Silicon Valley Code Camp, San Mateo Scrum Professionals, Silicon Valley Agile Camp, Eastern Iowa Agile, and Silicon Valley Agile Trends & Leadership
Speaker:
Ron Lichty
In addition to training teams in scrum, taking on interim VP Engineering roles, and advising organizations and coaching teams to make their software development "hum", Ron Lichty mentors managers about how their roles change with agile. While his recent Addison Wesley book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) didn’t zero in on agile, both the book and the classes that he and his coauthor give current and prospective managers espouse a deeply agile mindset for managers. He also coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html). His book was recently released as video training, http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net/video.html
Definitions of Done and High Performance TeamsRon Lichty
What’s the most powerful practice in Agile? My candidate: a team-crafted, team-owned definition of done.
Our research findings: product teams are most effective when they have a definition of done defined by the team itself collaboratively.
Might the practice of crafting a definition of done – before writing a single line of code – be the most powerful practice in Agile? Or does having a definition of done matter? What is the correlation between Definitions of Done and high performance teams?
Thousands of people on product teams all over the world respond to our survey for the Study of Product Team Performance. We asked them.
Here's what the data shows.
Presented November 2018 to the Silicon Valley Engineering Leadership Community, and January 2017 to the Silicon Valley Agile Trends & Leadership.
Speaker:
Ron Lichty
In addition to training teams in agile, Ron Lichty has spent years coaching managers about how their roles change with agile. While his recent Addison Wesley book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) didn’t zero in on agile, both the book and the classes that he and his coauthor give current and prospective managers espouse a deeply agile mindset for managers. He also coauthors the annual Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
The primary focus of his consulting practice, these last five years, has mirrored what he did as a manager: untangling the knots in software development. His career has spanned web applications, system software, entertainment, shrinkwrap products, ecommerce, interface development, embedded devices, professional services and IT - and grew from first level managing to VP Engineering, VP Product and CTO roles.
As Ron Lichty Consulting, he takes on fractional Interim VP Engineering roles, trains teams in scrum, transitions teams to agile, trains managers in managing software people and teams, and advises organizations to make their software development “hum.” http://www.ronlichty.com
Managing the Unmanageable was recently released as video training - LiveLessons: Managing Software People and Teams - both from Pearson and on O’Reilly’s Safari Network (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net/video.html).
Transforming chaos to clarity - acm 6.15Ron Lichty
Does your software development feel chaotic?
If you have ever been dissatisfied with your software development flow - if you would like to figure out how to avoid chaos - this is a presentation for you!
Ron Lichty has found himself repeatedly called in as the cavalry to help development groups stuck in confusion. A recognized engineering leader, Ron says, “I've found that I excel at coming in cold, identifying the causes of chaos, untangling organizational knots, creating roadmaps everyone can follow, building communications with other parts of the organization, and getting teams productive and focused on delivery, quality and customers.” He adds, “With a few pointers, any team member can more deeply diagnose their team.”
Ron is author of Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams, which has been compared by reviewers to Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man Month. After managing software and product organizations for 25 years, Ron has catered his leadership roles to the needs of his clients, including interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles.
Six years ago, Ron began training teams in agile and a year ago training managers in the nuances of managing software people and teams, whether in waterfall environments, or iterative or agile ones.
If you would like to become an effective agile team member then you'll want to attend this presentation. We’ll look at agile trends, software team pain points, product team solutions, and how every team member contributes to making teams excel.
Drawing from his experience with dozens of product development organizations, Ron will walk through the steps needed to assess your organization’s workings and pull together the elements that will bring order and increased productivity for your business.
Bio:
Ron Lichty has been managing and more recently consulting with software development and product organizations for over 25 years, engaged in untangling the knots in software development and transforming chaos to clarity. Originally a programmer, where he earned several patents and wrote two popular programming books, he was hired into his first management role by Apple Computer, which nurtured his managerial growth in both development and product management.
Principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc. (www.RonLichty.com), he has trained teams in scrum, transitioned teams from waterfall and iterative methodologies to agile, and coached teams using agile, iterative and waterfall approaches alike to make their software development "hum". In his continued search for effective best practices, Ron co-authors the annual Study of Product Team Performance.
Ron's most recent book is Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams - http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net - co-authored with CTO Mickey W. Mantle. Published by Addison Wesley, it has been compared by reviewers to Mythica
Crash Course - managing software people and teams (sfelc, 10.26.16)Ron Lichty
"We'd like you to manage the team now." That's about as much introduction - and training - as many of us get before our first day managing. Often preceded only by, "You're a great programmer,” and maybe, “it feels like you've got some people skills.”
But while programming cred and facility with people are helpful qualifications, what do you really need to know to manage well? What makes a manager great? What are the qualities that meld teams and deliver great software? What will make both your programmers and your execs rave? Those are among the questions that led Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle to write "Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams" (Addison-Wesley).
In this interactive session, Ron will examine the great managers each of us has experienced, and the qualities, skills, finesse and gifts of greatness that made them stand out. He'll talk about "the rest of the job": managing up, managing out, and other aspects of being a seasoned manager that reports mostly don't see.
You'll take away a few best practices that take most managers years to discover.
Do you want to be a manager (are you sure)Ron Lichty
Managing programmers is hard! Becoming a successful manager requires a drastic change of focus. There are expectations to consider before making a leap to the “dark side.”
The transition from programmer to manager is made particularly challenging by the dramatic difference between what made us successful as programmers and what it takes to successfully manage others. In addition, programmers are an interesting management challenge.
We tend to be free spirits, playful, curious, and (very) independent.
How can you ease the transition into management? What’s management really about? What will you give up?
Bio:
Ron Lichty wants to make software development better worldwide by advancing the practice of software development management. He has been alternating between consulting with and managing software development and product organizations for 25 years, almost all of those spent untangling the knots in software development and transforming chaos to clarity, the last 20 of those in the era of Agile. Originally a programmer, he earned several patents and wrote two popular programming books before being hired into his first management role by Apple Computer, which nurtured his managerial growth in both development and product management roles.
Principal and owner of Ron Lichty Consulting, Inc. (www.RonLichty.com), Ron has repeatedly been brought in as an acting CTO and interim vice president of engineering to solve development team challenges. He has trained teams in Scrum, transitioned teams from waterfall and iterative methodologies to agile, coached teams already using agile to make their software development "hum", and trained managers in managing software people and teams. In his continued search for effective best practices, Ron co-authors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron's most recent book is Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams - http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net. Published by Addison Wesley as both book and video training, it has been compared by reviewers to software development classics, The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware.
During Ron's first three years at Charles Schwab, he led software development of the first investor tools on Schwab.com, playing a role in transforming the bricks-and-mortar discount brokerage into a premier name in online financial services. He was promoted to Schwab vice president while leading his CIO’s three-year technology initiative to migrate software development from any-language-goes to a single, cost-effective platform company-wide and nurturing Schwab's nascent efforts to leverage early Agile approaches. He has led products and development across a wide range of domains for companies of all sizes, from startups to the Fortune 500, including Fujitsu, Razorfish, Stanford, and Apple.
Ron co-chairs the Silicon Valley Engineering Leadership Community.
AIPMM talk - chaos to clarity: managing the unmanageable, ron lichty, 12.7.12Ron Lichty
Good software management:
⁃ How to recognize it when you see it
⁃ How to encourage it
⁃ How to encourage senior management to encourage it
⁃ How to collaborate with it effectively
What does good software development management look like?
How do good programming managers motivate their teams?
What are programming managers bedeviled by?
How are programming managers tormented by product managers?
What are the forces that cause discord between product and software development managers?
What can be done about feature creep and late changing requirements?
Why do so many parts of organizations expect feature requirements to change but not delivery schedules?
What are objectives shared between programming managers and product managers that could encourage collaboration?
What would happen if programming managers and product managers formed mutual admiration societies with each other?
Crash Course - Managing Software People and TeamsRon Lichty
"We'd like you to manage the team now." That's about as much introduction - and training - as many of us get before our first day managing. Often preceded only by, "You're a great programmer,” and maybe, “it feels like you've got some people skills.”
But while programming cred and facility with people are helpful qualifications, what do you really need to know to manage and lead well? What makes a manager great? What are the qualities that meld teams and deliver great software? What will make both your programmers and your execs rave? Those are among the questions that led Ron Lichty and his co-author Mickey W. Mantle to write "Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams" (Addison-Wesley).
In this interactive session, Ron will examine the great managers each of us has experienced, and the qualities, skills, finesse and gifts of greatness that made them stand out. He'll talk about "the rest of the job": managing up, managing out, and other aspects of being a seasoned manager that reports mostly don't see.
You'll take away a few best practices of leading and managing that take most managers years to discover.
BIO: Ron Lichty
Ron Lichty has been managing and, more recently, consulting in software development and product organizations for over 30 years at companies like Apple, Fujitsu, Schwab, Razorfish, Forensic Logic, Stanford, Check Point, and dozens of startups of all sizes. Before that, as a programmer, he coded compiler code generators, was awarded patents for compression and security algorithms he designed and coded for embedded microcontroller devices, wrote two widely used programming texts, and developed the computer animation demo that Apple used to launch and sell a next-generation line of PCs.
Ron has mostly led development teams and organizations, but also product managers, project managers, testers, designers, ... pretty much everyone on product teams. The primary focus of his consulting practice, these last eight years, has mirrored what he did as a manager: untangling the knots in software development. His career grew from first level manager to VP Engineering, VP Product and CTO roles.
As Ron Lichty Consulting, he takes on fractional Interim VP Engineering roles, trains teams in scrum, transitions teams to agile, trains managers in managing software people and teams, and coaches teams to make their software development “hum.” http://www.ronlichty.com
Addison Wesley recently released the 2nd edition of his fifth book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net), compared by many readers to programming classics The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. He also co-authors the periodic Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Leading and Motivating Engineers - what product managers need to know - prod...Ron Lichty
Effective, experienced technical product management is crucial to make software development hum: Engineering and Product Management are symbiotic. Product managers lead and motivate by first establishing credibility with engineers, and by bringing vision, data, collaboration, prioritization, and protection. Ron Lichty has repeatedly been brought in to transform chaos to clarity in software development. Here’s what product managers can apply to lead and motivate engineers and make software development hum.
BIo:
Ron Lichty has, for 30-plus years, championed delighting customers. He believes that strong product/engineering collaboration is essential to achieving that goal. Ron co-authored the Addison-Wesley book Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net) and annually coauthors the Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Ron spent seven years as a programmer, two years as a product manager, and 25 years managing product and development organizations at all levels - to VP of engineering, VP of product and CTO - at companies ranging in size from tiny startups to Charles Schwab,Stanford, and Apple.
He now consults across that realm, taking on fractional interim VP Engineering and acting CTO roles, training teams in agile, training managers in managing software people and teams, and coaching development teams and executives in making software development hum. (http://www.ronlichty.com)
Ron has long been a popular speaker at product, development and agile meetups and conferences. Ron@RonLichty.com
12 Take Aways - Managing the UnmanageableRon Lichty
His 450-page book, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net), published by Addison Wesley, has been compared by many readers to programming classics The Mythical Man-Month and Peopleware. It was recently released as video training - LiveLessons: Managing Software People and Teams - both from Pearson and on O’Reilly’s Safari Network (http://www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net/video.html). He also co-authors the biannual Study of Product Team Performance (http://www.ronlichty.com/study.html).
Think Like an Agilist - Agile Sydney 2014Jason Yip
Culture is not just visible artefacts and behaviour, value statements, and culture books. The foundation of culture is our underlying mental processes, beliefs, and assumptions.
Think Like an Agilist is an exercise using difficult scenarios, and think-aloud protocol, to expose and allow us to examine and practice adjusting our assumptions (aka culture).
Agile Sydney 2014 version.
Lean Software Development: On Radiators and RefrigeratorsJason Yip
My presentation at the first Ignite Sydney. In hindsight I should have titled it: "No Problem is a Problem: Lean Thinking for Managing Software Development"
Becoming an Agile Manager (Agile Camp, 9.21.13), by Ron LichtyRon Lichty
A common misconception about agile is that managers are unnecessary. After all, agile is based on self-organizing teams. If the teams organize themselves, what do managers do?
Unfortunately, most scrum training plays into that. Think about it: how many trainers or coaches have you seen sketch the structure of a scrum team with a drawing that includes a manager? While there's always a scrum master and a product owner, the core team and maybe some stakeholders, have you ever seen a manager in that drawing?
This misconception can be a problem all around: A frequently cited barrier to agile adoption is managers who don't know what to do when their teams become self-managing. When they're not included in training, how would they (or anyone else, for that matter) know how to characterize their role. At the same time, organizations often lay down expectations of managers, some compatible with agile, some not.
Agile has clearly shifted the old roles and responsibilities. Managers bent on command-and-control are clearly a barrier to agile adoption. But managers who take a hands-off approach or are treading water in a sea of ambiguity will almost certainly stymie adoption, as well.
Ron Lichty believes (and so do a lot of leading agile thought leaders) that managers have critical roles to play in enabling success, both of transitions to agile and of agile itself. This session is about those roles.
Effective, experienced technical product management is crucial to make software engineering hum: Engineering and Product Management are symbiotic. When engineering is chaotic, many times applying a product management “fix” can do the trick. Ron Lichty has repeatedly been brought in to transform chaos to clarity in software development. Here’s a set of diagnoses, each with a product management fix that product managers can apply to make engineering hum.
Edgy Lean, Agile, and Systems Thinking things that you may not have heard ofJason Yip
My presentation at LAST Conference 2012 in Melbourne: http://www.lastconference.com/
The general idea was to share edgy ideas that the audience hadn't heard of. I started with ideas that everyone should have heard of and then add on next level concepts.
If I handed you a sealed envelope with a list of problems I know exist in most software development shops, this is what would be inside.
Presented at SyXPAC
Sydney Limited WIP Society presentation on "Systems Traps and Opportunities". Part of series introducing Systems Thinking based on Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows
If We Are Agile, Why Do We Need Managers? (sv-aln, 7.14)Ron Lichty
A common misconception about agile is that managers are unnecessary. After all, agile is based on self-organizing teams. If the teams organize themselves, what do managers do?
Unfortunately, most scrum training plays into that. Think about it: how many trainers or coaches have you seen sketch the structure of a scrum team with a drawing that includes a manager? While there's always a scrum master and a product owner, the core team and maybe some stakeholders, have you ever seen a manager in that drawing?
This misconception can be a problem all around: A frequently cited barrier to agile adoption is managers who don't know what to do when their teams become self-managing. When they're not included in training, how would they (or anyone else, for that matter) know how to characterize their role. At the same time, organizations often lay down expectations of managers, some compatible with agile, some not.
Agile has clearly shifted the old roles and responsibilities. Managers bent on command-and-control are clearly a barrier to agile adoption. But managers who take a hands-off approach or are treading water in a sea of ambiguity will almost certainly stymie adoption, as well.
Ron Lichty believes (and so do a lot of the early agile thought leaders) that managers have critical roles to play in enabling success, both of transitions to agile and of agile itself. This session is about those roles.
If we’re agile, why do we need managers (tri valley aln, 3.14)Ron Lichty
A common misconception about agile is that managers are unnecessary. After all, agile is based on self-organizing teams. If the teams organize themselves, what do managers do?
Unfortunately, most scrum training plays into that. Think about it: how many trainers or coaches have you seen sketch the structure of a scrum team with a drawing that includes a manager? While there's always a scrum master and a product owner, the core team and maybe some stakeholders, have you ever seen a manager in that drawing?
This misconception can be a problem all around: A frequently cited barrier to agile adoption is managers who don't know what to do when their teams become self-managing. When they're not included in training, how would they (or anyone else, for that matter) know how to characterize their role. At the same time, organizations often lay down expectations of managers, some compatible with agile, some not.
Agile has clearly shifted the old roles and responsibilities. Managers bent on command-and-control are clearly a barrier to agile adoption. But managers who take a hands-off approach or are treading water in a sea of ambiguity will almost certainly stymie adoption, as well.
Ron Lichty believes (and so do a lot of the early agile thought leaders) that managers have critical roles to play in enabling success, both of transitions to agile and of agile itself. This session is about those roles.
AgileCamp 2014 Track 2: Agile is Hard , Ron Lichty, CEO of Ron Lichty Consulting, Ron Lichty Consulting, Pollyana Pixton, (Accelnova), Brian Drummond, Agile Coach (LinkedIn), Jason Kline, Agile Coach (Salesforce)
Middle Management in an Agile World webcastMark Lines
In an increasingly agile world, do we still need middle managers? Clearly we do, but middle management and HR departments must adapt or never meet the promise of highly motivated and productive teams. Some of the changes required may be considered quite radical when compared to traditional HR practices. But without these changes you will have difficulty attracting and retaining the talent you need.
In this webinar, Mark Lines provides an overview of trends we see in organizational design, career paths, the new role of middle management, and some progressive ideas regarding compensation and performance management.
No more managers! No more hierarchy! A truly self organizing, self-running team! These phrases strike fear into managers almost as much as: We are moving to agile. As successful companies like Zappos, GitHub, and Treehouse discard managers from their teams, other software managers are left wondering about their futures. The reality is that managers are even more relevant and necessary today—if they transform from command-and-control to a coaching-style role. Employees need to know they have an advocate—not just in the business but in their careers. Learn from Brian Sobus how to become that advocate as he draws on his experience leading agile and traditional software development teams. Peer over the abyss as Brian delves into the nuances that are required for this new manager role. Learn how we perceive managers, how that perception must change, and how managers can embrace this transformation. Discover why this needed leadership meshes well with and elevates self-directed teams.
Managing for Happiness
Games, Tools and Practices to Motivate Any
Team A Webcast by Ralph Jocham and Scrum.org
Moderated by Eric Naiburg Video aca: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfoN0a34kcE&feature=emb_logo
Teaching pointy haired bosses to be agile enablersRyan Ripley
Are managers hindering your Agile transition? Does it seem like things would be better if the managers all left?
Most managers are intelligent people who have built their careers and fed their families with their current knowledge and experience. During an agile transformation, we need them on-board. Managers know their present situation better than anyone else. They also have inside knowledge about the corporate systems and culture that agile coaches need in order to be successful.
But in some cases the manager does not understand agile. In extreme cases, they can become an impediment to an agile transformation moving forward. How can you get these managers back on your side, supporting the agile transformation?
Agile coaches should start with working to understand what the world looks like through the eyes of these managers. To facilitate this understanding, I discuss re-purposing the concept of product user personas to create manager personas that explore the issues, reservations, hold-ups and concerns that are keeping the manager from supporting an agile transformation.
With this new understanding, agile coaches can develop ways to demonstrate to managers why the agile approach is better, where management fit in the larger picture, and how management also benefits from the changes in the way the team delivers value back to the organization. These insights show managers where they can improve agile projects, how they can add value in a newly transformed organization, and how agile coaches can guide management without alienating them during an agile transformation.
Studies ubiquitously show that Leadership and Culture are among the top factors for a successful Lean Agile transformation. What specific actions should leaders take to structure Lean Agile transformations? How does leader style enable cultural change? This session provides 1) a practical set of actions to start or improve your transformation and 2) a specific list of behaviors to do and NOT to do in setting the right culture as a leader.
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers new opportunities to radically reinvent the way we do business. This study explores how CEOs and top decision makers around the world are responding to the transformative potential of AI.
Senior Project and Engineering Leader Jim Smith.pdfJim Smith
I am a Project and Engineering Leader with extensive experience as a Business Operations Leader, Technical Project Manager, Engineering Manager and Operations Experience for Domestic and International companies such as Electrolux, Carrier, and Deutz. I have developed new products using Stage Gate development/MS Project/JIRA, for the pro-duction of Medical Equipment, Large Commercial Refrigeration Systems, Appliances, HVAC, and Diesel engines.
My experience includes:
Managed customized engineered refrigeration system projects with high voltage power panels from quote to ship, coordinating actions between electrical engineering, mechanical design and application engineering, purchasing, production, test, quality assurance and field installation. Managed projects $25k to $1M per project; 4-8 per month. (Hussmann refrigeration)
Successfully developed the $15-20M yearly corporate capital strategy for manufacturing, with the Executive Team and key stakeholders. Created project scope and specifications, business case, ROI, managed project plans with key personnel for nine consumer product manufacturing and distribution sites; to support the company’s strategic sales plan.
Over 15 years of experience managing and developing cost improvement projects with key Stakeholders, site Manufacturing Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Maintenance, and facility support personnel to optimize pro-duction operations, safety, EHS, and new product development. (BioLab, Deutz, Caire)
Experience working as a Technical Manager developing new products with chemical engineers and packaging engineers to enhance and reduce the cost of retail products. I have led the activities of multiple engineering groups with diverse backgrounds.
Great experience managing the product development of products which utilize complex electrical controls, high voltage power panels, product testing, and commissioning.
Created project scope, business case, ROI for multiple capital projects to support electrotechnical assembly and CPG goods. Identified project cost, risk, success criteria, and performed equipment qualifications. (Carrier, Electrolux, Biolab, Price, Hussmann)
Created detailed projects plans using MS Project, Gant charts in excel, and updated new product development in Jira for stakeholders and project team members including critical path.
Great knowledge of ISO9001, NFPA, OSHA regulations.
User level knowledge of MRP/SAP, MS Project, Powerpoint, Visio, Mastercontrol, JIRA, Power BI and Tableau.
I appreciate your consideration, and look forward to discussing this role with you, and how I can lead your company’s growth and profitability. I can be contacted via LinkedIn via phone or E Mail.
Jim Smith
678-993-7195
jimsmith30024@gmail.com
The case study discusses the potential of drone delivery and the challenges that need to be addressed before it becomes widespread.
Key takeaways:
Drone delivery is in its early stages: Amazon's trial in the UK demonstrates the potential for faster deliveries, but it's still limited by regulations and technology.
Regulations are a major hurdle: Safety concerns around drone collisions with airplanes and people have led to restrictions on flight height and location.
Other challenges exist: Who will use drone delivery the most? Is it cost-effective compared to traditional delivery trucks?
Discussion questions:
Managerial challenges: Integrating drones requires planning for new infrastructure, training staff, and navigating regulations. There are also marketing and recruitment considerations specific to this technology.
External forces vary by country: Regulations, consumer acceptance, and infrastructure all differ between countries.
Demographics matter: Younger generations might be more receptive to drone delivery, while older populations might have concerns.
Stakeholders for Amazon: Customers, regulators, aviation authorities, and competitors are all stakeholders. Regulators likely hold the greatest influence as they determine the feasibility of drone delivery.
The Team Member and Guest Experience - Lead and Take Care of your restaurant team. They are the people closest to and delivering Hospitality to your paying Guests!
Make the call, and we can assist you.
408-784-7371
Foodservice Consulting + Design
Oprah Winfrey: A Leader in Media, Philanthropy, and Empowerment | CIO Women M...CIOWomenMagazine
This person is none other than Oprah Winfrey, a highly influential figure whose impact extends beyond television. This article will delve into the remarkable life and lasting legacy of Oprah. Her story serves as a reminder of the importance of perseverance, compassion, and firm determination.
Oprah Winfrey: A Leader in Media, Philanthropy, and Empowerment | CIO Women M...
If we are agile, why do we need managers (code camp, 10.14)
1. If Weʼre Agile…
Why ! Do We Need Managers?#
#
#Ron Lichty, principal, Ron Lichty Consulting
author, Managing the Unmanageable!
www.RonLichty.com, www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net #
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21. Leaders and Agile
• Rules of Thumb
Management sets the boundaries of what needs to
be done and says to the team, I trust you to figure
out how to get it done.
23. Leaders and Agile
• Rules of Thumb
Trust but verify.
-‐
RONALD
REAGAN
24. Leaders and Agile
• Rules of Thumb
Trust but verify.
-‐
RONALD
REAGAN
quo-ng
VLADAMIR
LENIN
– imperative not to micromanage
– the essence of delegation
– setting expected outcomes for teams
25. Leaders and Agile
• Rules of Thumb
Trust but verify.
-‐
RONALD
REAGAN
quo-ng
VLADAMIR
LENIN
I inspect what I expect.
-‐
ALAN
LEFKOF,
Netopia
CEO,
quo-ng
LOU
GERSTNER
31. Leaders and Agile
• Waterfall is wasteful
– but Waterfall seemed easy: it’s very concrete
• Agile seems easy: it has practices
– but Agile is not practices
• Agile is a philosophy
• What’s hard: breathing life into the practices
• making them your own
• adapting them to the uniqueness of your teams,
people, culture, products