Craig fires some questions at Ron Lichty, co-author of “Managing the Unmanageable” and the “Study of Product Team Performance“:

• Author of machine Language programming books “Programming the Apple IIGS in Assembly Language” and “Programming the 65816“
• Managing the Finder team at Apple – hired for stellar C++ coding ability and customer empathy
• Software development is a team sport – including QA, a dedicated product manager / product owner and designers
• After Dark and Flying Toasters at Berkeley Systems
• “Managing the Unmnageable” is 9 chapters and around 300 rules of thumb and nuggets of wisdom (the creamy centre), the tools used to manage software development teams plus the authors own insights
• There were very few books (7 at the time) on managing software developers (unlike project management and agile)
• Fred Brooks – “The Mythical Man-Month“
• Situational Leadership – opens your…

Craig is at YOW! Conference and spends some time with Emily Webber, Agile Coach and author of “Building Successful Communities of Practice” and “The Agile Team Onion” and they chat about:

• The UK Government Digital Service and gov.uk (and the United States Digital Service and Australian Digital Transformation Agency)
• Government needs to be fast and stable (but dealing with change every four years)
• YOW! 2016 talk “Communities of Practice: The Missing Piece of your Agile Organisation“
• Communities of practice are about building knowledge, giving people support networks they need to give them the confidence to do their jobs well and making that practice better and as good as it can be
• Most communities of practice are organic but they tend to be closed and often lack direction
• Community of Practice Maturity Model
• Having an idea of who the community is for and…