Managers transitioning from waterfall to Agile will need to renegotiate their relationship with their teams if they are to succeed. A manager cannot simply become an Agile Manager – a big part of a transition requires a rethinking of how job titles are assigned and the leadership responsibility that comes with them. I was recently […]
Scrum
How to Be an Effective Manager in Scrum
You’re a manager. You recently helped implement Scrum in your organization. You have received praise for this, because quality of work is now steadily improving and customers are delighted by the steady stream of product improvements. Your Scrum teams are now self-organizing. Things are flowing so smoothly now, the team has taken on tasks that […]
Scrum by Example – Stories for the Working ScrumMaster
What does it take to be a great ScrumMaster? When I was in my early years as a Scrum Trainer, circa 2011, it was noticeable to me that while there was a plethora of content out there explaining the role of the ScrumMaster and what qualities you want in a person for the role, there […]
How to Cross-Skill and Grow T-shaped Team Members
As we discussed in “Specialists Are Overrated,” developing cross-skills and “T-Shaped” people in a team has many benefits – for the team/organization itself, the customer, and the individual. That’s all fine and good to say, but how do you figure out where to start? There are two major ways to discover opportunities for cross-skilling: Kanban/Scrum […]
Specialists Are Overrated
“Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.” – Agile Manifesto “Watch the baton, not the runner.” – D. Reinertsen, 2007[1] Traditionally, notions of efficiency have been to minimize cost by utilizing experts (i.e. expensive people) only on the most difficult problems and having cheaper workers do […]
How to Get the C-Suite to Support Agile
“I’m not here to experiment. I’m here to get production stacks out the door, and Agile helps us get there.” — Tim Burke, VP of Cloud and Operating System Infrastructure Engineering at Red Hat Yearly since 2013, Scrum’s certifying body, Scrum Alliance®, sponsors the State of Scrum, a survey of more than 2,000 of their member […]
Don’t Inflict Scrum or Kanban on Teams
(This article is part of the Beyond Scrum series) We’ve all experienced the pain of having someone impose a change on us – it doesn’t work. Forcing change conflicts with the essential human need for autonomy – No one likes being told what to do (if they didn’t ask to be). Whichever model for understanding […]
Is There a Best Day to Start and Finish a Sprint?
No, of course not. So when should your Team start and end Sprints? The usual rules of Scrum apply – ask the Team. Run an experiment. There is an instinctive tendency to want to wrap up things at the end of the work week so we can unplug our brains for the weekend, and start […]