Software Engineering Manager, Agile Coach, PMP, PSM, SPS
Hi, I’m Piotr and I’m a host of this independent blog where I share stuff that I deal with in my professional life. It’s mainly about software development management and team management, though it wanders into other areas at times.
I live in Gliwice, Poland with my wife and daughter, and I consider myself a reasonable experienced software engineering manager with a particular interest in Agile and cultivating strong, self-organizing teams.
More about meAgile is probably the best approach when it comes to developing complex IT solutions. It’s widely used in product development, but unfortunately, it’s still not that straightforward when you’re working for external clients. The problem is that in far too many situations it’s the corporate purchasing department that awards the seller with a contract, and fixed-scope, fixed...
Having a potentially shippable product every sprint lies in a heart of Agile, but in many organisations – especially the ones that don’t work in SaaS model – a product is not released to the market every sprint. Sometimes frequent delivery is not possible (i.e. in case some additional tasks like a translation of a documentation, legal approval, etc. have to be done at the end of the...
Many teams transitioning to Agile struggle with delivering a potentially shippable product every sprint. Producing a piece of software that provides a business value to a client every 2 weeks seems impossible. Usually, teams say that they can deliver either front-end, or backend, or architecture design for a given feature, but not all these together. It’s a common problem for many teams...
Transparency is a key value in Agile organisations. It improves employees’ motivation and make the teams perform better. At the same time, transparency is difficult to achieve, because it usually requires serious changes to company’s culture and mindset. You can’t do it overnight, but fortunately, each and every step towards this goal counts. Transparency allows for building an...
Introduction Empowering people and teams is critical for organisations to gain competitive advantage and succeed. Smart delegating of responsibilities results in more engaged employees, better culture and improved overall productivity of a company. Knowledge and experience are shared among a larger group of employees which in turn increases organisation’s flexibility and agility. However...
Managing complex and lengthy projects is a challenge. When dozens of people are working on the same product in parallel there has to be a mechanism for identifying and resolving dependencies and cross-team blockers. In traditional projects, it’s a PM’s task to ensure that all the team members are working on right tasks in right order. She is the one who decides about priorities...
Couple weeks ago I came across a great article about software estimation by Pawel Brodzinski which made me think about how my approach to estimating software projects has evolved over time. At the moment I work in product development where Agile approach is used to deliver new increments of software. We have stable teams and we use Story Points and Velocity to estimate and plan our sprints and...
Introduction An effective reward system can motivate employees and increase their work performance. It can have a very powerful influence on people’s behaviour and, therefore, many organisations implement it as an integral component of their compensation strategy. However, not all reward programmes are beneficial. Moreover, inefficient systems are counterproductive, destroy creativity, hurt...
In my recent blog post I covered a topic of limiting Work in Progress. I briefly mentioned that in many companies working on many tasks in parallel is somehow more important than accomplishing them. 100 utilisation myth Many organisation believe that their employees should always be busy with work which results in aiming for their constant 100% utilisation. At first glance it may sound reasonable...
In many organisations being busy is valued more than delivering the results. At first sight, it may sound quite reasonable – after all, we’re all paid for having hands full of work, aren’t we? Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. In a vast majority of cases, the more tasks we try to complete, the less we really accomplish. And pushing yourself to work even harder...