Group items tagged

training strategy for a significant enterprise that is contemplating an “all in” (immediate and across the entire company) enterprise scale transformation approach

for the enterprise, a combination of team-based and role-based training that would touch every practitioner is ideal

all team practitioners receive a minimum of two days of agile training, (agile team training for the each team in the enterprise)

It is critical that everyone has the same understanding of, and commitment to, the desired outcome: a business that is reliable through predictable technology processes that deliver business agility. To do this, there needs to be a management commitment to develop a focused, on-going practice around the pursuit of organizational maturity. As part of this, gaps in skills and capabilities should be identified and positive action – training, coaching, process improvement and tools deployment – taken in order to close the gap

the work force needs to understand the business drivers for Agility. They need to be challenged to improve their quality, improve their cycle times, to improve the frequency of releases and the value they deliver to the customer. They need to know how these things fit within the bigger picture and why improvement is their responsibility.

To change a culture it's important to recognize that every knowledge worker makes decisions and takes actions that affect the performance of the business. The culture in the organization is the reflection of those decisions and actions.

It’s a lot easier to estimate a story that’s small — which can lead to more accurate estimates, and better predictability.

It’s easier to plan with smaller stories. With big stories — stories that might take weeks for a developer to implement — it becomes difficult to plan a development time-box — particularly when the iterations are only a couple of weeks. It seems that only a couple stories fit — and there’s often room for half a story — but how do you build half a story? Splitting them into smaller stories makes it easier to plan those time-boxes.

Shrinking stories forces earlier elaboration and decision-making. Where product owners could write their stories fairly generally and consider many of the details later, now breaking them down into smaller stories forces more thinking earlier in a planning lifecycle.

Responsibilities Vary by Software Business TypeSince the business mission, organization, operating methods, roles, titles and responsibilities differ dramatically across industry segments, it follows that the patterns of agile adoption vary across these segments as well

Information Systems/Information Technology (IS/IT) -teams of teams who develop software to operate the business; accounting, CRM, internal networks, sales force automation and the like. Customers are primarily internal to the enterprise.

Embedded Systems (embedded) - teams of teams who develop software that runs on computers embedded in other devices - cell phones, electronic braking systems, industrial controls and the like. Customers may be either internal or external to the enterprise.

managers handle 'external stuff' to the team

ontract negotiations and procurement.

he role that a line manager plays in an employee's personal and professional development, often in the form of coaching or assisting in HR-related issues

Identify the technical leaders within projects; those that are “self-driven to produce quality results on time … combine technical ability with enough people skills …are trusted and respected by both their managers and fellow developers, are determined to make the team succeed, and usually live the work.” (Chief programmers, Chapter 2:  A Practical Guide to FDD).

Sell them the vision: if you cannot sell these people on the benefits to them, their colleagues and the organization of the new way of working then something is wrong

Provide in-depth training and on-going coaching. It is better to have a single lead person trained in-depth who can coach his teammates through the basics than to have the whole team trained on the basics with no-one on the team to turn to when the basics are not enough.

So if they needed the ScrumMaster role filled, then this was something they were prepared to train and assign to either a project manager or possibly a technical lead. The consensus of this team was, if you found a project manager skilled enough to have a real technical dialog with the development team, then this person could be trained and perform the ScrumMaster role.

The Scrum Alliance published a survey that has some supporting evidence. Over 60% of the 1100 people that responded to the survey had nine or more years of industry experience, 15% of them had twenty or more years of experience, and 35% had Masters degrees. Also, of the people who responded, 22% were project managers and another 21% were either Managers or Directors. So my simple translation is that practicing ScrumMasters are managers (project or other) with significant (10+) years of proven experience. Training and assigning this role to experienced project managers or software development managers seems like a viable approach to have the responsibility filled and having a dedicated ScrumMaster separate from these roles may not be necessary.

Scrum in a nutshell Split your organization into small, cross-functional, self-organizing teams. Split your work into a list of small, concrete deliverables. Assign someone to be responsible for that list and to sort the list by priority. The implementation team estimates the relative size of each item. Split time into short fixed-length iterations (usually 1 – 4 weeks), with potentially shippable code demonstrated after each iteration. Optimize the release plan and update priorities in collaboration with the customer, based on insights gained by inspecting the release after each iteration. Optimize the process by having a retrospective after each iteration. For more details check out “Scrum and XP from the Trenches”. The book is a free read online. I know the author, he’s a nice guy :o) http://www.crisp.se/ScrumAndXpFromTheTrenches.html Kanban in a nutshell Visualize the workflow Split the work into pieces, write each item on a card and put on the wall Use named columns to illustrate where each item is in the workflow Limit WIP (work in progress) – assign explicit limits to how many items may be in progress at each workflow state. Measure the lead time (average time to complete one item, sometimes called “cycle time”), optimize the process to make lead time as small and predictable as possible.