In January many of us resolve to get more organized at home and try to bring some more sanity to our busy lives. Last year, a designer on my team gave me the ultimate compliment: she and her boyfriend were using my Scrum-ban-plan board at home.  She has become such an enthusiast of using the […]

Outside of the daily blogging I did in November, I struggled with posting a monthly article for most of 2013. Still, this year Sockets and Lightbulbs continued to grow with 44% more views and, more importantly, a 243% increase in followers on WordPress.com and email. Thank you so much! Reading, liking, commenting and sharing and sharing my […]

In many companies and industries there has been a trend to combine “management” roles in an effort to reduce costs or improve efficiency. Personally, I first noticed this trend with combining project management and functional management roles. The reasoning is that any competent manager should be able to handle the project management duties for their […]

Who owns quality for your product? Whenever I ask that question, I am often met with one or more of the following reactions: A blank stare “Testing/Quality Assurance/Quality Control, of course!” “Management.” (lots of variations on that) “Creative/technical leadership.” So, maybe the better question is: Who defines quality?

As projects wrap-up and start-up, you may have the challenge of accommodating end-of-project vacations, hiring new team members and reforming teams to best meet the needs of the new project.  Teams should be kept together as projects move in and out, but that is not always possible, particularly in some industries. To help you visualize […]

“Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There’s plenty of movement, but you never know if it’s going to be forward, backwards, or sideways.” – H. Jackson Brown Jr After reading my post on how not to implement Agile, a friend asked me to write a post about discipline and discuss whether it […]