Think about how many times you have been asked that question. How many times have you ever actually been right?We can debate all we want whether this is a fair question to ask given the tremendous amount of uncertainty in knowledge work, but the truth of the matter is that our customers are going to inquire about completion time whether we like it or not. Which means we need to come up with an accurate way to answer them. The problem is that the forecasting tools that we currently utilize have made us ill-equipped to provide accurate answers to reasonable customer questions. Until now.

    Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to learn and improve. We hope that this book helps you and your teams to do retrospectives effectively and efficiently to reflect upon your ways of working, and continuously improve them!

    This new edition includes the latest research and case studies, and offers inspiring new and relevant stories of real people achieving extraordinary results.

    The first type drain intelligence, energy, and capability from the ones around them and always need to be the smartest ones in the room. These are the idea killers, the energy sappers, the diminishers of talent and commitment. On the other side of the spectrum are leaders who use their intelligence to amplify the smarts and capabilities of the people around them. When these leaders walk into a room, lightbulbs go off over people's heads, ideas flow, and problems get solved. These are the leaders who inspire employees to stretch themselves to deliver results that surpass expectations. These are the Multipliers. And the world needs more of them, especially now, when leaders are expected to do more with less. In this engaging and highly practical book, leadership expert Liz Wiseman and management consultant Greg McKeown explore these two leadership styles, persuasively showing how Multipliers can have a resoundingly positive and profitable effect on organizations—getting more done with fewer resources, developing and attracting talent, and cultivating new ideas and energy to drive organizational change and innovation. In analyzing data from more than 150 leaders, Wiseman and McKeown have identified five disciplines that distinguish Multipliers from Diminishers. These five disciplines are not based on innate talent; indeed, they are skills and practices that everyone can learn to use, even lifelong and recalcitrant Diminishers. Lively, real-world case studies and practical tips and techniques bring to life each of these principles, showing you how to become a Multiplier too, whether you are a new or an experienced manager. Just imagine what you could accomplish if you could harness all the energy and intelligence around you. Multipliers will show you how.

    Yet, chances are, you aren’t formally trained in managing projects—you’re an unofficial project manager.FranklinCovey experts Kory Kogon, Suzette Blakemore, and James Wood understand the importance of leadership in project completion and explain that people are crucial in the formula for success.Project Management for the Unofficial Project Manager offers practical, real-world insights for effective project management and guides you through the essentials of the people and project management process:InitiatePlanExecuteMonitor/ControlCloseUnofficial project managers in any arena will benefit from the accessible, engaging real-life anecdotes, memorable “Project Management Proverbs,” and quick reviews at the end of each chapter.If you’re struggling to keep your projects organized, this book is for you. If you manage projects without the benefit of a team, this book is also for you. Change the way you think about project management—"project manager" may not be your official title or necessarily your dream job, but with the right strategies, you can excel.

    You open the box and right on top is a quick-start guide. Being a novice, you follow the guide, and quickly get up and running. As you become more experienced, the other box contents address common advanced issues you'd face, like right-sizing teams, estimation, hitting deadlines, transitioning from Scrum or Waterfall, deploying components and services, and using Kanban within larger organizations.Real-world experience from a direct practitioner working on Xbox and Xbox.comA concise, pragmatic, and easy-to-read guide with clear, fresh, and hard-won guidanceUsing Kanban within larger organizations - how to deal with upper management, planning, and dependencies

    The rules? No marketing budget, no PR stunts, and it must be sustainably successful. No short-term fads.This is not a game of chance. It is a game of skill and strategy.And it begins with a single question: given competing products of equal pricing, promotion, and perceived quality, why does one outsell the others?The answer doesn’t live in the sustainably successful products or services. The answer lives in those who use them.Our goal is to craft a strategy for creating successful users. And that strategy is full of surprising, counter-intuitive, and astonishingly simple techniques that don’t depend on a massive marketing or development budget. Techniques typically overlooked by even the most well-funded, well-staffed product teams.Every role is a key player in this game. Product development, engineering, marketing, user experience, support—everyone on the team. Even if that team is a start-up of one. Armed with a surprisingly overlooked science and a unique POV, we can can reduce the role of luck. We can build sustainably successful products and services that rely not on unethical persuasive marketing tricks but on helping our users have deeper, richer experiences. Not just in the moments while they’re using our product but, more importantly, in the moments when they aren’t.

    As Senge makes clear, in the long run the only sustainable competitive advantage is your organization’s ability to learn faster than the competition. The leadership stories in the book demonstrate the many ways that the core ideas in The Fifth Discipline, many of which seemed radical when first published in 1990, have become deeply integrated into people’s ways of seeing the world and their managerial practices. In The Fifth Discipline, Senge describes how companies can rid themselves of the learning “disabilities” that threaten their productivity and success by adopting the strategies of learning organizations—ones in which new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, collective aspiration is set free, and people are continually learning how to create results they truly desire. The updated and revised Currency edition of this business classic contains over one hundred pages of new material based on interviews with dozens of practitioners at companies like BP, Unilever, Intel, Ford, HP, Saudi Aramco, and organizations like Roca, Oxfam, and The World Bank. It features a new Foreword about the success Peter Senge has achieved with learning organizations since the book’s inception, as well as new chapters on Impetus (getting started), Strategies, Leaders’ New Work, Systems Citizens, and Frontiers for the Future. Mastering the disciplines Senge outlines in the book will:• Reignite the spark of genuine learning driven by people focused on what truly matters to them• Bridge teamwork into macro-creativity• Free you of confining assumptions and mindsets• Teach you to see the forest and the trees• End the struggle between work and personal time

    At under 200 pages it's quick reading too. Makes a great airplane book.

    Through four years of groundbreaking research, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance—and what drives it—using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research. Readers will discover how to measure the performance of their teams, and what capabilities they should invest in to drive higher performance.

    Kanban leverages visual management techniques to involve stakeholders and to facilitate understanding of how the work works. Through limiting the amount of work in process, and by focusing on finishing that work as soon as possible, kanban helps you to adjust demand to capacity, to reduce lead times and to create a driver for continuous improvement.Kanban in Action is a down-to-earth, no-frills, get-to-know-the-ropes introduction to kanban. It's based on the real-world experience and observations from two kanban coaches who have introduced this process to dozens of teams. In this book, you'll discover basic but powerful techniques on how to visualize and track work, how to construct a kanban board, how to visualize queues and bottlenecks, and much much more. You'll learn the principles of why kanban works as well as nitty-gritty details like how to use different color stickies to help you organize and track your work items.

    And in a perfect world, those who produce the best code are the most successful. But in our perfectly messy world, success also depends on how you work with people to get your job done.In this highly entertaining book, Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman cover basic patterns and anti-patterns for working with other people, teams, and users while trying to develop software. It's valuable information from two respected software engineers whose popular video series, "Working with Poisonous People," has attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers.You'll learn how to deal with imperfect people--those irrational and unpredictable beings--in the course of your work. And you'll discover why playing well with others is at least as important as having great technical skills. By internalizing the techniques in this book, you'll get more software written, be more influential, be happier in your career.

    It’s helpful for learning Agile and Scrum, and also for a basic preparation for the PSM I exam (Professional Scrum Master level 1). It can also act as a simple reference for Scrum practitioners.

    Kerth guides readers through productive, empowering retrospectives of project performance.Whether your shop calls them postmortems or postpartums or something else, project retrospectives offer organizations a formal method for preserving the valuable lessons learned from the successes and failures of every project. These lessons and the changes identified by the community will foster stronger teams and savings on subsequent efforts.For a retrospective to be effective and successful, though, it needs to be safe. Kerth shows facilitators and participants how to defeat the fear of retribution and establish an air of mutual trust. One tool is Kerth's Prime Directive:Regardless of what we discover, we must understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job he or she could, given what was known at the time, his or her skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.Applying years of experience as a project retrospective facilitator for software organizations, Kerth reveals his secrets for managing the sensitive, often emotionally charged issues that arise as teams relive and learn from each project.Don't move on to your next project without consulting and using this readable, practical handbook. Each member of your team will be better prepared for the next deadline.

    In addition to 12 comprehensive lessons, this innovative book includes games, exercises, Tricks of the Trade and common pitfalls and mistakes well as enough sample test questions for nearly a full CAPM exam. This book contains over 400 pages of material, including new exercises and sample questions never before in print. With critical time-saving tips, plus games and activities available nowhere else, this book will help you pass the CAPM exam on your FIRST try.