This has been an ongoing debate for a number of years. There are essentially three groups of Project Managers:
- Traditional Project Managers – they’ve typically operated in Waterfall environments and frequently reference the PMBOK. They often follow best practices, templates, and models for effectively “managing” projects. Usually they view success to be plan-driven.
- Agile Project Managers – who are normally quite different than their traditional counterparts. They focus on the team and are more facilitators and coaches than project managers. They also consider success to be team-driven.
- Then there are Traditional Project Managers who want to play in agile environments, so they start looking for specific tools and techniques that they can “borrow” from the agile approaches. They take more of a hybrid approach to project management, and this group seems to be increasing as agile approaches have become mainstream. Often these folks have acquired PMI-ACP certification, but they have little else in the way of real world agile experience.
This update is from the STP conference I’m attending in Denver the week of November 3, 2014. Software Test Professionals is a conference mostly focused towards testing, so the slant of all of the talks is that lens or perspective. That being said, the agile topics are by definition broader and more whole-team centered.
I just attended a session by Jeff Porter where he was exploring agile practices in a talk entitled: Agile – Where the Rubber Hits the Road.
Now let me start by saying that I liked Jeff’s talk. It was very pragmatic and practical. He simply shared what they were doing at FamilySearch.org. Practitioner reports like this one truly enhance the state of practice in the agile community.
Introduction
There are several terms used for it within agile contexts. Sometimes you hear:
- Done
- Definition-of-Done or DoD
- Done-Ness Criteria
- Acceptance Criteria
- Release Criteria
Sometimes you even hear it repeated, as in: This story isn’t complete until its—“Done…Done…Done”.
Apparently the more “done’s” you have, the more emphasis there is on completeness. Although I don’t think I’ve heard more than four “done” used in a row.
If you don’t know, I’ve got some opinions about Scrum, the Product Owner role, Backlogs, and User Stories. I’ve written a book about Product Ownership and I spend a great deal of my time up to my eyeballs in stories and backlogs at various clients.
One of the things that frustrates those clients is that there are very few “prescriptive rules or firm guidance” when it comes writing stories and crafting Product Backlogs; in many ways, it’s more art than science. It’s also a practiced skill that gets better the more you actually do it—of course as a team, which is also true of agile estimation.
No is a very tricky word. I often talk about agile teams needing to “just say No” to various things. For example:
- If their Product Owner expects them to deliver more than their capacity
- If their Boss asked them to deliver faster and it would violate their Definition of Done agreements
- If a Team Member continues to “go it alone” and refuses to collaborate as a team
Then I’m looking for the team to say No. Whenever I bring this up in classes or presentations, I always get pushback. Always. Usually its not based on the situation, but to the word. It seems No is a word that nobody likes using in the workplace.
There’s a wonderful video by Henrik Kniberg where he explores the role of the Scrum Product Owner. In it he makes the point that the most important word that a Product Owner can use is No. That it’s incredibly easy to say – Yes to every request. To pretend that things are always feasible or easy. But that No is important. No implies that trade-off decisions need to be made on the part of the customer or the organizations leadership. That the word leads to thinking, discussion, and decision-making.
I was once working with a peer agile coach and we were discussing the role of the coach within agile teams. His view was that it was as a “soft, encouraging, influencing” role. That at its core agility is about the team. And the team in this sense is…self-directed.
He also emphasized that taking a more direct or prescriptive approach in our coaching would be anathema to good agile practices. That it was draconian and dogmatic.
He was actually a leader of this firms coaching team, so he had tremendous influence over a team of ten or so agile coaches. I was one of them and I sometimes struggled with his view and approach.
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.
I saw the following series of snippets in a LinkedIn discussion on the Agile ALM tool Rally. Bear with me as you read through them to get the context for our discussion…
Original Question
I have a serious case of "I want to get back to JIRA Agile".
My latest challenge with Rally is to find the best and most true way of dealing with unfinished stories at the end of a sprint.
Story: I as a ScrumMaster want to move 3 unfinished stories from Sprint 1 to Sprint 2 gracefully so that the team will have these stories in the next sprint without falsifying the velocity of Sprint 2 or the backlog and not creating any more overhead for the ScrumMaster.
Acceptance Criteria:
- Total backlog story points stays true
- Velocity of previous sprint stays true (commitment is reflected accurately)
- it's not adding a huge amount of overhead on the ScrumMaster or the person doing it
- It doesn't need a custom app for doing this
Looking forward to your feedback!
Recently a young engineer stopped me after a class I shared at a national conference and was asking questions. The context in this case was this:
We were talking about the importance of having “dynamic” Sprint Reviews that engaged the organizations stakeholders and customers. How showing “working code” was important for the team to show progress towards their Sprint Goals and commitments.
In this particular case, the client organization was delivering more API level software to their internal customers. They were being asked for system-level functionality in some communications equipment and would implement low-level code to meet the requests. They would expose the User Stories functionality via API calls.
Last week I attended a 4-day Scaled Agile Framework class with a result of sitting for my SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) test. A few days after the class, I received an email telling me I passed the exam. I am now a proud and newly minted SPC. This enables me to teach several SAFe courses, to kick-off and coach Agile Release Trains (PSI’s), and to generally coach organizations that are adopting SAFe.
But to be honest, I’m still digesting SAFe. It’s not that I’m having trouble with the concepts or approaches. It’s more so that I’m having a challenge fitting them into my own experience in a useful way. You see much of what I learned in the class I’ve been using and doing for a long time in my own agile journey. But I’ve couched those techniques under Scrum of Scrums for agile scaling—and with fairly good success.
