Viewing entries tagged
collaboration

Agile is a Team Sport

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Agile is a Team Sport

By definition, agile development is a team sport. The emphasis is on teams working and delivering together. It’s not measured by how many user stories the development team produces, but by how many completed/done stories the team can produce.

Quality is not something “owned” by the testers, but the responsibility of the entire team. In fact, you don’t try to “test in” quality, but rather “build it in”.

It places collaboration and teamwork above individuals working alone. It values pairing and swarming around work. It values limiting WIP so that team members work together.

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Stand-up and Be Counted

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Stand-up and Be Counted

I came across a wonderful post about changing the daily stand-up meeting. It aligned incredibly well with how my own thinking has evolved of late. It’s by Cheryl Hammond from Northwest cadence. She makes some points around reframing the questions and/or focus of the daily standup meeting.

While I don’t agree with the entire premise of her recommendation, she did make me think some more about it and most of what she said aligned with my own evolving position.

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The Agile PM: WIPping Things Into Shape

The Agile PM: WIPping Things Into Shape

I once was leading / coaching a team that struggled mightily to work together as a team. I was the Director of R&D at an eCommerce SaaS product company. We had been leveraging Scrum for a number of years with reasonably good success and had approximately 10 Scrum teams focusing on the various aspects of our online product.

But there were a couple of teams that were really struggling, which often seems to be the nature of things. Out of ten teams, we had about three that were high performing, three that were moderately performing, and three that struggled along. Don’t get me wrong, the team members were solid people and good employees. It was just that this whole “agile collaboration thing” was hard for some of them to grasp and embrace.

The Agile Project Manager—The TRIAD at the Heart of Agile Collaboration

I was employed a few years ago at a wonderful company. I first joined them as an agile coach and Scrum Master. I had been spending an inordinate amount of time on the road teaching, so this local opportunity to coach a set of agile teams was timely and incredibly welcome by my family and I.

After joining, I was soon promoted to a Director of Software Development role and became a member of the senior leadership team. That was my title and my primary role, but I continued to coach and champion agility across the organization.

I used to joke about arguing with myself because I had two halves. I had the dark-side responsibility of “management” (Darth Vader) and the light-side responsibility of coaching our self-directed agile teams (Luke Skywalker). Although I felt I achieved a reasonably good balance, it certainly was challenging at times to keep my heavy breathing to a minimum.