12 votes

What to do with work not on the board?

TL;DR If the work matters, make it visible. If it doesn't, then treat it as muda and trim it as non-essential waste. You truly cannot have it both ways. "No Invisible Work, Ever!" CodeGnome'...
Todd A. Jacobs's user avatar
  • 50.1k
12 votes
Accepted

What to do with work not on the board?

You can have a technical leader. You can have him do work off the charts. You can hide this work from others that don't "need to know". You can reduce that person's capacity to make planning more ...
nvoigt's user avatar
  • 8,471
9 votes

Strategy for whole team switching tehnologies

Don't do this. Speaking as a developer, this sounds great. We get to rewrite that horrible old spaghetti code from scratch! We get to paid to learn a new language! There's a mandate for quality, so ...
Sarov's user avatar
  • 14.8k
7 votes
Accepted

Should a technical person take part of the user stories prioritization process?

Product Owner and the Development Team collaborate The Scrum Guide is very clear on these aspects: Product Owner and the Development Team collaborate on Backlog refinement: Product Backlog ...
Ashok Ramachandran's user avatar
4 votes

How do you handle a tech lead that takes over PO/PM role? (Unwanted)

TL;DR You will end up with a product that does not meet your business need, unhappy employees, and self-organising teams that are dead on arrial. Innovation will also suffer. Impact on Product Since ...
MrHinsh - Martin Hinshelwood's user avatar
4 votes

As a technical lead how to ensure that DB schema is perfect for the new project to start with?

You don't try to handle everything up front or predict the future. It's a waste of time and effort. As you build out the software and get stakeholder feedback, you will learn more about the true needs ...
Thomas Owens's user avatar
  • 19k
3 votes

What is the most technically challenging project you have worked on as a non-technical project manager?

My answer would be: I facilitate technical answers. I trust the team to provide technical answers; I make sure that there is nothing that stands in the way of their understanding the problem and ...
MCW's user avatar
  • 8,728
3 votes

Should a technical person take part of the user stories prioritization process?

It sounds like there's a whole lot going wrong with your Scrum process. It's important to realize that a product backlog is not prioritized. It is ordered. There is no reference to a prioritized or ...
Thomas Owens's user avatar
  • 19k
3 votes

How to assess technical knowledge of the team?

If you're going to base it on code, then why not take code they've written already? That would save the 3 days. ;-) Assuming your company (like all companies) hires only the best people, the quickest ...
Danny Schoemann's user avatar
3 votes

How to assess technical knowledge of the team?

Check their CVs and look for experience and other talents that will add value to the team. Also, keep in mind which skill sets are key to your project Get feedback from previous project managers and ...
TTKDroid's user avatar
  • 386
2 votes

Characteristics of a real project manager

This is a tough one to answer. I think a lot of discussion on this topic one might find out there is not much more than hyperbole. There have been some studies on leadership, where some traits were ...
David Espina's user avatar
  • 37.1k
2 votes

Characteristics of a real project manager

This is not an easy question to answer. The answer varies from company to company, from culture to culture. So collected some existing qualities that I can resonate with. I have found this list on ...
Zsolt's user avatar
  • 11.9k
2 votes

How technical should a Project Manager be?

The requirements for a project manager always go out from a project profile. Check DPCI for instance. You can use risk profiles as well. More technical experience: Small - you just won't have ...
Alexander Averchenko's user avatar
2 votes

How technical should a Project Manager be?

While I have seen projects completed successfully with non-technical PMs, I've also seen a lot of disasters. (That's one of the pushes I had to move from programming to PM.) One point I have not seen ...
Danny Schoemann's user avatar
2 votes
Accepted

How to make the Product Owner realize that he doesn't put focus on the right customer at all?

I will assume what the "VIP" want fall somewhere between what you think and what the PO believes. I'll add some facts to that assumption: the VIP do not truly know what they want - not granulary ...
Muhammad's user avatar
  • 864
2 votes

Strategy for whole team switching tehnologies

Below are some suggestions you may follow: First of all communicate to upper management the high learning curve costs involved (time and money). Perform specialized trainings. Hire trainers that know ...
DesignerAnalyst's user avatar
2 votes

Strategy for whole team switching tehnologies

The technology part of this question is not relevant to the problem. If the company has decided to make a change, then change is what you need to do. This also assumes that the case for change ...
David Espina's user avatar
  • 37.1k
2 votes

What is needed to become a robotic team/startup leader?

I work in a company doing AI, I can share with you some of the books that are influential for the work we do, but I think the best recommendation is to get real world experience on into this ...
Roberto Anzaldua's user avatar
2 votes

Should a technical person take part of the user stories prioritization process?

Both previous answers from Thomas and Ashok are right on point (+1!) and I just wanted to throw a slightly different perspective not to the answer itself, but to the question. Should a technical ...
Tiago Cardoso's user avatar
  • 8,625
2 votes

As a technical lead how to ensure that DB schema is perfect for the new project to start with?

You don't. Schema can be changed at any point in future. Predicting perfect schema is impossible. I say that after doing this for 6 years now. It is simply impossible to know what can come up. With ...
jitendragarg's user avatar
2 votes

What to do with work not on the board?

From the Scrum Guide: Scrum is a framework for developing, delivering, and sustaining complex products. Everything in Scrum is centered around the development, delivery, and maintenance of ...
Thomas Owens's user avatar
  • 19k
1 vote

Team management to get something streamlined

It would help to know the nature of your team's work, and what kind of tickets you work on. Handing over work in progress to a different person works reasonably well if the task is shoveling sand from ...
Hans-Martin Mosner's user avatar
1 vote

What is the most technically challenging project you have worked on as a non-technical project manager?

I would answer that as PjM/PdM I am not expected to contribute to the project; I am expected to create a comprehensive spec and schedule and then to track it to timely completion.(*) To do so I need ...
Danny Schoemann's user avatar
1 vote

As a technical lead how to ensure that DB schema is perfect for the new project to start with?

Strongly normalized data schema should be more flexible to change to meet evolving requirements. Ensure the schema is normalized. Beyond that, this is a quality/suitability to business requirements ...
MCW's user avatar
  • 8,728
1 vote

As a technical lead how to ensure that DB schema is perfect for the new project to start with?

Firstly, I'm not so sure this has to do with Project Management. More to the point, why bother? It's rather simple to add fields to a database - even a live one. If you're really paranoid, you could ...
Danny Schoemann's user avatar
1 vote

How to make the Product Owner realize that he doesn't put focus on the right customer at all?

I would try to use the instruments Scrum provides out of the box: Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective. How Sprint Review can help: Since VIP People are the stakeholders of the software you ...
Alexey R.'s user avatar
  • 315
1 vote

Strategy for whole team switching tehnologies

I have also encountered to this issue especially when technologies of web / app development changes and improves much more than before. To be honest, I work on Swift 3 iOS app for project management ...
Larry Lo's user avatar
  • 253
1 vote
Accepted

How to assess technical knowledge of the team?

So as I understand, you would not like to invest 2-3 days in assessing their skills (of course the best method is the code writing efficiency) to make selections? I feel one of the most important ...
Abhishek Srivastava's user avatar
1 vote

Strategy for whole team switching tehnologies

This is quite a sticky situation. Firstly, you say the "management decided". This isn't ideal and the decision should have been made by the team, without the management's involvement whatsoever. ...
Muhammad's user avatar
  • 864
1 vote

How do you handle a tech lead that takes over PO/PM role? (Unwanted)

The lead developer sounds like he wants to be an old school development manager & have oversight & make a go/no go on all decisions. Rather than a functional manager who manages the people but ...
amelvin's user avatar
  • 1,393

Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible