Agile Complexification Inverter

What philosophy do you use when hiring new members for the team? The tendency for many teams is to create an interview hazing process.  Requiring interviewees to run a gauntlet of silly questions, riddles, etc.  Is it not obvious that this will result in a poor hiring decision? If you ask an experienced, knowledgable HR person they can tell you how poor the hiring process really is.  Ask a researcher and they will tell you that it is one of the poorest business process for producing the desired results.  Yet almost every organization continues this tried, but not true process. Google, being a big data company has done it's own research on the topic.  Read the results. In Head-Hunting, Big Data May Not Be Such a Big Deal Google’s Quest to Build a Better Boss There are many reasons people choose to leave a company, here is one top three list: Disengaged with organizational mission Lack of respect for co-workers A terrible boss Google found...

I hope to collect a few good videos from the Agile2013 conference over the next few weeks in this blog posting.  Maybe you could send me your favs. Gil Broza on his work supporting people and " The Human Side of Agile ." Agile 2013 - Peter Saddington - The Science of High Performing Teams I enjoyed Peter's presentation. OK - this one is Linda Rising's Keynote from 2012, The Power of the Agile Mindset .  She held two session on this topic at Agile2013. ... more to come ...

How precise are your estimates?  Are we inferring false precision with those 5 significant digits? I saw an hours estimate for a medium size project at our company just the other day.  I don't remember the actual digits, but that's not the point it was a number like: 4145.8 hours Let's just assume that a team of 7 people will do this project.  How many weeks is this?  I'd guess 4145.8 hr divided by (7 * 40) equals 14.806 weeks.  Or, as a human would say it 15 weeks, give or take. Are those digits really necessary?  No.  Are they even real?  No.  They are just artifacts of inappropriate rounding or truncation.   There is very little doubt that someone could estimate a 4000 hour project down to the quarter of an hour (the implied accuracy of the 0.8 hour).  And if you think they are so good at estimating that they can distinguish between 45 hours and 50 hours for a portion of this project - well, then keep on trucking to the mi...