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Showing posts with the label Project Management

How to handle a cranky team member

Scenario: You have been working on a team where a team member has been throwing tantrums on every decision made. He has been involved in some of them but claims to not be engaged. He keeps complaining of not being kept in loop, does not react positively to feedback and generally shirks responsibility. These are symptoms that something else is wrong. How do you go about managing this scenario?

Crystal Ball - How you can efficiently manage team productivity

Before I jump into the topic, I will start with some context. We were working on a very complex product - Complexity in multiple dimensions. As a team, We needed a simple way for us to understand how we manage complexity as team scales and use it as a simple communication tool.  To generalise: Context: A complex project A fairly large team High Volatility Product Engineering team Challenges A way to manage complexity as a team Tool for communication on progress  A mechanism to calibrate progress with the bigger roadmap Crystal Ball Crystal Ball is a simple tool for visualising progress on a granular scale. It helps in tracking progress and for teams to look at what they can achieve going forward.  It helps in internalising the progress that the team made in the past few weeks and then relate to it as they plan forward. How we used it Our team was fairly big - a 7 pair dev team with 3 Was , 1 BA and a PM. We also had an XD and...

The enterprise agile

Consumer Vs Enterprise Every time there is a consumer use product, we see that the enterprise comes up with a very customized version so that the enterprise does not have to adapt. This is with good reason. Enterprise is an entity that is too complex and having it to change would mean a disruption to the business  - something that the stakeholders are not very happy about. For example, take the iPhone and Blackberry. iPhone is a consumer centric product while Blackberry is a very enterprise centric product. However, iPhone introduced major disruptions to the way the enterprise security functions and forced enterprises to be more flexible with the way they allow employees to view email. This increased productivity since employees could view their emails at home or anywhere on the move and respond more quickly. Another example is Microsoft word Vs Google docs. The days when a simple document would have to go through multiple revisions with the whole track changes turn...