Project & Team Management

Three Ways to Shake Up Agile Development with Design Thinking

If you’re a member of an Agile software team, you know that the routines of Agile can sometimes feel tedious. And it’s hard to know what to change. Do you need to change your meeting frequency? Can some routines be eliminated? Should you scrap Agile altogether? Rather than abandoning Agile, consider incorporating some simple design […]

Successful Dev. Team Onboarding – Trust, Tradeoffs, and Giving Everyone the Benefit of the Doubt

Adding a new team member can be a challenge for both the individual and the team. A new person can shake up a team’s culture, and a team’s culture may force the new member to adapt and change. Sometimes it goes well. Sometimes it doesn’t. For things to go smoothly, everyone needs to play their […]

Three Steps to Setting Expectations in Software Development

If there’s one thing that can help guarantee the success of a software project, it’s ensuring that everyone’s expectations about the project are aligned. It’s very important to set expectations about what features a project will have, what platforms it’s supposed to run on, when it’s going to be delivered, and how much it’s going […]

Three Unconventional Ways to Get New Team Members up to Speed

During my first six months at Atomic Object, I’ve had the opportunity to work on three projects. As a result, I’ve spent quite a while getting ramped up on new projects. Each project had different technical requirements, business domains, and team dynamics. As different as these projects were, there was one common denominator: the typical […]

The Importance of Bidirectional Trust in the Workplace

Maker, developer, programmer. For the last twelve years, these are words that I would use to describe my primary function at work. That changed recently when I became a manager for the first time. It’s been a fun and challenging transition. In only a few months, I’ve learned a lot and become immensely aware that […]

Consulting Under Pressure

Every developer has had late nights of debugging seemingly impossible problems. And every consultant has been through crucial conversations explaining their reasoning for tough decisions. Those of us who are software developers and consultants get all the highs and lows of both. High-pressure consulting situations can be tricky to navigate in the heat of the […]

Bringing the Customer Along Is Worth It

As a Delivery Lead at Atomic, I sit between the client and the product team and one of my responsibilities is to enhance the client’s experience. What does that really mean? It varies depending on the makeup of the client team and the objectives for their project. However, a common element of any client enhancement […]

Adding Blockers to Your Backlog? Always Include a Specific Next Step

A pet peeve of mine is when progress on a story is blocked with a reason like: “Need code sample to add live chat feature.” Or: “Don’t have VPN access.” What needs to happen next? Does someone know they need to help unblock this? I’m sure I’m not the only one who would be wondering […]