Jump to content

Management

Management is not easy and in this category we have articles on Management to help you understand and navigate the world of management.

19 articles in this category

  1. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    If you work in IT, you have probably heard the words projects and maintenance many times. Usually it is in reference to different teams and organizations, but not always. Sometimes the same team can do both projects and maintenance, which can cause some confusion. To add to that confusion, you will sometimes hear the word line work as well. As these all see to be a bit malleable, it can cause some annoyance. With this article, I hope we can make a definition so we all know what we are talking ab
  2. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    Employees don’t leave organizations, They leave bad bosses. We have all heard it and we all probably have a bad boss experience or two in our career. But what is a bad boss really? Are they just terrible monsters that tear organizations apart, or are they just people like you and me? Just as people are different, so are our perception of what a bad boss is. What I consider to be a bad boss, may not be a bad boss to you. It all depend on who we are as individuals and what we currently need.
  3. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    Value stream management, probably most noticeably introduced as a part of the SAFe framework in nothing new. It is a simple visualization of the value creation process connected to the financial aspects. In short, it is a way to organize work based on finance and perceived value to the end user. This approach is another top-down version and as such it comes with both positive aspects and negatives. If handled correctly it can be mostly positive however. Let us begin by setting the stage for
  4. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    As organizations grow it will always increase the number of middle managers to stay organized. If the organization assign the wrong type of managers you may notice that that number start to grow a lot. You may also notice that the level of trust that exist between the different areas drop as well. This is what I call The Proxy Organization, and it is very damaging for your company. Every organization forms a hierarchy. This is how we make sense of the world around us. We define structures s
    Jimi Wikman
    • 0 comments
    • 1,117 views
  5. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    If you have worked in IT in the past 10-15 years or so, you probably have endured the endless regurgitation of meaningless information in a daily stand-up. You have probably felt the anxiety of being judged and been annoyed over your teammates doctoring their results to look more productive. You probably also wished you did not have to go to the meetings once or twice. What if I told you there is a better way to manage daily stand-ups? Because there is. First let us figure out what the purp
  6. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    Product owners often get blamed for not understanding Agile and for not providing clear requirements. Is this their fault though, or are you not providing the correct feedback to help them improve? Agile teams often work with the product owner absent, especially in the retrospectives. If that is true for your team, who is actually at fault then? I hear this all the time. "The product owner" is absent or "the product owner can't give a straight answer on what I should do, it changes by the m
  7. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    Over the years I have seen many claims to what flavor of Agile is king. In this article we will look at Scrum and Kanban to see if we can determine which of these two flavors are the best for you and your team. I have a feeling you will be surprised at the answer, but I hope you will not be. I recently read an article called "Scrum Is Dead. All Hail Kanban, the New King" where the author Emanuel Marques praise the Kanban flavor of Agile as his experience of Scrum have been less positive com
  8. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    Agile 2 is here. It has been in the works for a while and from what I can tell there has been some sharp and experienced minds involved in that work. It is in many ways a retrospective, but also a way to look at the great failure that is Agile. A failure that originates in the division of visions and the ideal becoming absolutes. Agile 2 hope to change that and it is a great ambition that have my wholehearted support. In the case for Agile 2 the statement is that one of the issues with the
  9. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    I must admit that I am amused at the sheer number of posts that flood the Internet the last months that all revolve around how to make remote teamwork work. They all seem share one common thing and that is that they are written by, or for, managers. The thing is though that for most of us that work in IT this has worked for decades and it is for many of us a part of our daily routine. It is with a sad smile that I see the complete hysteria from middle and upper management when it comes to w
  10. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    So, one of your employees are leaving the company. Your first instinct is to kick them out as fast as possible and if something goes wrong you probably will not go out of your way to fix the situation. This is a terrible idea as you will make that person less inclined to talk well about you in the future! The employee have spent time in your company and they probably liked you when they started. Had hopes and dreams of what the time with you would be that either was not fulfilled or thei
  11. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    As a manager you often work harder than anyone else in the team. Long hours, often after the workday has ended, or even weekdays sometimes, is unfortunately not uncommon. There are conflicts to be resolved and content switching that will make anyone exhausted. This is a sure way to burn yourself out if you let it and this is why it can be a good thing to take a voluntary demotion once in a while. This may sound like a terrible idea, but I have found that not only will a voluntary demotion r
  12. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    In the last 3-4 years I have noticed an increase in the speed of which things are done within companies. By that I do not mean that we produce things faster, I mean that we take decisions or share information faster. That may sound like a good thing, but as always when things are done fast the quality drops. What I see however is even worse and that is that people, often young people, are getting hurt. Management is not an easy profession, regardless of position in an organization. There ar
  13. 💫 Jimi Wikman ·
    Restyaboard is rather similar to Trello and other Kanban based services. Unlike most of them however Restyaboard is open source and it comes with a lot of functionality. If you like the simplicity of Trello, but you need a bit more functionality or you just don't want that additional cost, then Resyaboard could be a viable alternative. Restyaboard is easy to work with and the features are pretty impressive. They have put together an extensive list of features that is then matched with Trell