Pragmatic Agilist

Do you have a group of, say, 100 people, whom you want to organize optimally for a software delivery program?  Martin Fowler is famously on record saying that " scaling agile is the last thing you should do. " A better approach is to try to scale down your project. ...an unscientific straw poll revealed that most projects could lose about half the people of the project without making things go slower. Time and time again I hear of success occurring when a team is cut significantly in size. Large teams carry a big overhead in communication and management. Using smaller teams staffed with more able people is usually faster and cheaper, even if the everyone is more individually expensive. This brings to mind one of Tom Waite's "non-lethal weapons," the Shrink Ray, in the movie Mystery Men ,.  Aficionados of the movie (or comic) will remember that the ray is "based on simple dry-cleaning technology." From the Blu-ray site:  http://www.blu-ray.com/m...

As agilists, we all hear a lot about self-organizing teams.  I'm pretty sure I have already aired several, probably conflicting, opinions about self-organizing teams, like " someone else should assign people to the teams and decide what they should do, and THEN they should self-organize ," but today I would like to talk about something even more fundamental:  the self-organizing self.  Are you fully able to function on your own behalf, or even on the team's behalf, at times when you don't have a scrum master acting as a sort of personal time assistant?  Do you procrastinate?  Are you distracted?  Do you run out of money?  Do you lose things?  Let's assume you've tackled work--how well-armed are you for life? Helpful advice from  http://xkcd.com/337/ I would like to think that most of you are more personally organized than I am, and you probably are, but for those of you who need a little help, as I do, there are some free or cheap tech...