What if your team sucks? What if for one reason or another they just don’t deliver? It can happen for any number of reasons, but usually over time you see some teams that just never really manage to improve. They just kind of linger in the “suck zone”. How do you handle it? Whose job is it to deal with a situation like that? Is it the development managers responsibility? Is it something that the group VP needs to decide? Those are some of the most common roles that are called

“Too bad the only people who know how to run the country are busy driving cabs and cutting hair.” -George Burns I learned to drive in Southern California. I’ve always been kind of proud of that fact. Driving in the southern land of pavement and potholes requires a special kind of aggressive driving in order to survive the freeway melee. You have to learn to barge into a lane when there isn’t any room, to turn left on a light after it turns red, to tailgate in order to keep ot

I’ve heard people talk about the gradual gains that agile teams make over time as they engage with continuous improvement, but I’m here to tell you that isn’t what I see in the real world. I guess the expectation (perhaps my own included) is that when teams start to improve they will make many small changes over time and reap corresponding gains in performance. You know, a little change here, a little gain there. I guess I envision it looking a little like this: However, I se

In the Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell talks about a phenomenon called Fundamental Attribution Error. Basically, FAE is attributing success to the wrong things. His point was that we often fail to take context into account when making judgments. He gave an example of a study where subjects were asked to judge the performance of two basketball teams, one playing in a darkened auditorium and the other under normal lighting conditions. The subjects were asked, which team is bett