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Author Archives: Andrew Stellman

Getting Agile Right

Last week Jenny and I gave our new talk, Getting Agile Right [pdf], for the first time. We’re really excited, because it also marks our first public announcement of our current book project for  O’Reilly: a new book about agile development and project management. It’s aimed at people preparing for the PMI-ACP certification, but our goal is [...]

Admitting that you have a problem

It’s not always easy to recognize when your project is in trouble. Yes, if your project crashes and burns and completely fails to deliver, it’s failed. But sometimes you don’t realize that you’ve  or you’ve built the wrong software and are about to make your users very unhappy. The first step in fixing your project problems is admitting that you have a problem.

Confessions of a jerk

The other day I made this short, shameful confession in response to a Slashdot story about a Forbes blog post called When Smart People are Bad Employees. The post outlines three distinct types of bad employees. The third one was called “The Jerk,” and it sounded eerily familiar.

Here’s my confession: I’ve been that jerk in the past.

Demoralize Your Teams Quickly And Efficiently With Micromanagement

Apparently I’ve earned the dubious distinction of having become an expert in project failure. I’ve always had an interest in project failure—Jenny and I have been doing our “Why Projects Fail” talk for years now, and we’ve talked to many people in many different industries (like in our fourth book, Beautiful Teams) about what’s gone [...]

Inflict bad UX on users you secretly hate

About a year ago at a conference, a programmer came up to me for some advice about an unfortunate user interface he’d built. It was a pretty miserable affair: a combination of displaying too much information and offering too many choices, while at the same time burying the one thing that the user actually wanted [...]