Following last week’s interview with a newly-minted Scrum Master this week I have had a conversation with developer Mateusz Udowski. We talked about how SilverStripe’s adoption of Agile and Scrum have affected him and why he thinks SilverStripe is now more intelligent as a whole than it was before.

Mateusz, what was the most interesting thing that happened during the change? What was the most surprising?
I was expecting we would have problems with completing less exciting tasks such as testing, but that didn’t happen. Shifting the responsibility from individuals to the group gave space for everyone to work efficiently.

Also, we needed some structure and after we started working as a team we began to collaborate and everything seemed to fall into place. I think the main reason for our success was that the team members regarded each other as peers.

What's different now?
The biggest change is that there is no penalty for helping each other out anymore. The budget is relevant on the team level, but not on individual level, which means we can share problems and solutions.

One can clearly see what to work on now, and what needs to be worked on next. Tasks and impediments are clearly visible and are not being swept under the carpet.

Reducing the size of the team from 40 (whole company interacting semi-randomly) to 7 (Scrum team) makes it easier to work together, mainly because we get the chance to learn about and respect each others’ strengths, weaknesses and habits.

What is your day like now versus before?
Less stressful. It's possible to get more work done because we can focus on tasks and clearly see at any moment where we are in the sprint and in the project.

Folk wisdom has it that when you force a person's brain to focus on many things in parallel, their IQ falls considerably, and that's how it feels now - less chaotic, more intelligent.

What are you more more confident about now?
It's easier now to apply creative solutions and "refactor fearlessly". We have shifted from delivering at all costs to delivering high quality products up to capacity. Peer reviews, test coverages and testing by many people all contribute here.

It is possible to enhance how the team works both technically and from a process perspective. We can now build on top of what we have achieved in previous iterations because there is a "we" - a stable team.

What did you have to learn? What was the hardest to learn?
Not to tell people what to do and how to do it. It never worked well anyway. The other important ability is to be able to discern when is the time to say "no" to factors that would break the Scrum process.

How do you think you benefitted from working with a coach?
I've seen many of these Agile elements previously in different combinations and contexts, but never all put together.

A good coach will give you the confidence to apply all these principles now, immediately, and to achieve good result. Otherwise we would probably be stuck in the step-by-step approach which would stop halfway through and ultimately fail.

Pointing out the future possibilities is also helpful, showing that it's not the end of the road.

What's been in it for you?
There is more room for error and to try things out, hence more is possible. Short feedback loops and peer reviews provide a platform for learning and a cushion for failure.

Would you recommend Scrum and Agile to others?
Yep, without hesitation.


Conversations like these remind me why I love being an Agile coach. Whether the context or flavour is Agile, Lean, Systems Thinking, Scrum or Kanban (all very good things) - what it really boils down to is to make people’s working lives more enjoyable and purposeful and to create an environment where people are trusted to make decisions and have the freedom to succeed.

Mental note to self: Re-read this interview when I get frustrated with process, command and control and factory thinking.

Six months ago SilverStripe, an open-source Content Management System provider and Wellington web agency approached me to help them improve the way in which they deliver client and open source projects, increase employee happiness and, in general, just do the best possible job. To achieve this, we decided to move away from the existing Agile-like (fixed scope/fixed price) approach and introduce Scrum with its focus on client-driven iterations, early feedback and continuous improvement.

Silverstripe have asked me to interview some of their staff about the transition to Agile. The original posts can be found on Silverstripe's blog (Sam Minnée, Aleksandra Brewer), below are selected highlights from the interviews.

It has been interesting for me as a coach to learn how people experienced the changes including the biggest surprises, differences, and how they found the changes working out for them.

Today’s conversation is with Scrum Master Aleksandra Brewer. Alex works with one of the Agile teams at Silverstripe and has likened working with me to a visit to the dentist.

Alex, what was the most surprising thing that happened during the transition?

Some of the surprising (although maybe obvious) things were that (1) it's possible for more than one person to work on the same user story, (2) work goes faster when people collaborate, (3) sprint planning that results in greater understanding of stories and tasks necessary to complete them really speeds up the work during the sprint - everyone knows what needs to be done and can pick up a simple task and complete it.

What's different now?

I love being able to see the day to day progress of the team - it's so visible on the board, plus the work seems to be going faster, with several people going through small tasks all the time. With the acceptance criteria being defined and discussed before the start of a sprint, and with the Product Owner being available to answer any additional questions and provide feedback throughout the sprint, there is virtually no possibility for any team member to go off on a tangent.

What are you more confident about now?

Talking to clients is easier now, as they are much more involved and ultimately responsible for making decisions about priorities. We (the team) make recommendations, share our knowledge and inform the client about pros, cons and consequences of the different options, but in the end it's up to them to make a final decision.

All along the course of a project clients know exactly where we're at, what's being built, etc., which they love. The transparency of Scrum, although scary at the beginning, is really beneficial for both the team and clients.

What did you have to learn? What was the hardest to learn?

The hardest thing to learn was to give up the control over what the individual team members were doing from day to day.

How do you think you benefitted from working with a coach?

Working with you has been a bit like going to the dentist - painful at times, but all along I knew it was good for me, and I'm in better shape now than I was before. It's been good to have you keep us on track, and point out things that now seem obvious, and yet were not at first.

Would you recommend Scrum and Agile to others?

Definitely. I couldn't imagine going back to the old ways, negotiating "resourcing" among Project Managers, developers being on several different projects at the same time, and not knowing when a project would end because of the uncertainty of developer availability.





Conversations like these help me put my work into perspective: They show me where I can improve as a coach and help me be a bit less perfectionist and appreciate that, even though we are not perfect, we have come a long way and I have helped make some people's working days a bit more fun and satisfying.

Next week I will talk to Mateusz Udowski., a developer at Silverstripe.

In many companies, especially those who provide services to external clients, the main focus from a project management perspective seems to be on resource allocation and utilisation. People are viewed as individual “resources” and an important goal is to maximise people’s utilisation (Before you say this is not true, think about how important this metric is at your company and that people tend to optimise what is being measured).

I know that especially for vendors who often charge by the hour or have to keep cost down in a fixed price and scope scenario, utilisation is hugely important. That’s fair enough. However, making utilisation the main driving factor, will backfire and ultimately lower utilisation.

Why is this a problem?

By foregoing the team approach, aiming to maximise utilisation and piecing together projects through dynamically allocating and re-allocating people we:

• Take away the focus from the real end goal which is delighting our customers (people who either pay for, use or support our application).
• Inadvertedly sub-optimise individual parts of the system such as e.g. design, frontend development or database design by isolating them from the whole product.
• Miss out on optimising the development of the whole product or project.
• Ignore the fact that software is developed as one-of-a-kind, which causes variety and makes predictive planning impossible. Honestly, stuff often gets finished either earlier or later than initially planned and there’s nothing we can do about it.
• Have difficulty absorbing this inevitable variety if resource utilisation is too high as people will either be idle or unavailable as a consequence of variety and lack of slack (This is bad for utilisation and people will either be stressed out and over-worked or bored. Also, no slack makes it difficult to deal with emergencies and opportunities).
• Run the risk of cascading delays within projects: If one part of the project is delayed dependent parts will be delayed as well, leading to a cascading effect.
• Run the risk of cascading delays between projects: Projects waiting for a particular person to come free will be delayed, again potentially causing a cascading effect on other projects’ schedules.
• Create an increased need for handovers between individuals. Handovers are regarded as one of the biggest causes of waste in software development and come with the added danger of losing valuable tacit knowledge. Handovers also often cause misunderstandings through ambiguity and are plain evil.
• Miss out on the advantages of working in teams. A well-functioning team collaborates to a level where the sum is way bigger than its parts. Well functioning teams create magic - much like the All Blacks on a good day.
• Make bad decisions: Without teams each individual on a project will only have part of the picture and it is almost impossible to make good decisions without knowing the history, background and reasoning behind all the other little decisions that have been made on the project so far. Also, diverse groups of people are usually superior in decision making ability to individual experts.
• Incentivise people to care about their particular part only, which leads to behaviours that are detrimental to the success of the overall system. For example, if I reward a football player for the number of goals he scores he will most likely engage in egoistic behaviour that damages team performance. The same is true for software development teams - especially if people’s utilisation is linked to their salaries.
• Waste time allocating and re-allocating people to projects and trying to get the impossibly complex and variable puzzle to work out.

What to do?

If we, instead of the above, provide a group of people with a shared vision, collective responsibility, the authority to design their own processes and ways of working (the essence of self-organisation) while incentivising them as a team and giving them the all the support they need they will have a much greater chance in achieving the end goal of delighting the customer.

So, let’s:

• Organise people into feature teams and give them the freedom to succeed
• Focus on improving the boundary-spanning handovers within the organisation (just as Mary Poppendieck says!)

People will also be happier and love their jobs a lot more if we let them experience the magic of a team and “move work through people, not people through work”.



For further reading about building teams and organisational structures and behaviours that support teams I highly recommend Esther Derby’s blog.

Tags: agile , team, organisations, lean

Checklists have a somewhat bad reputation in the Agile world, probably because they “smell” of too little self-organisation and too much process. I find this reputation is entirely undeserved as they can be extremely useful as a memory aid, or to visualize a workflow.

Checklists play an important role in areas where missing steps can have disastrous consequences, such as in hospitals or airplanes; or in situations where people are likely to forget individual steps, such as when they’re stressed and tired; or while learning a new process or way of working.

At work we mainly use checklists when we want to introduce a new workflow and need to make sure we don’t forget about the process or any of its steps.

Here’s an example of our checklist for the sprint workflow and working with user stories:

We usually keep our checklists visible until the new workflow has become second nature and we don’t need reminders or memory aids anymore. Although, in saying that I realize that we created this particular checklist 6 months ago and we still like to have it around :-)

For us checklists are a very useful learning aid and workflow visualization tool, and as long as we decide on the processes ourselves we don’t feel they interfere with our self-organisaton.

Tags: checklists, agile, lean

Conducting an interesting and engaging end-of-sprint review is an often overlooked art: Not only do we want to show what we have built during the last sprint and collect feedback and good ideas for what to build next; we also want to give our audience a good experience.

At my workplace we always invite the entire company and often have more than 30 people in the room. As they claim to be happy and to enjoy the fortnightly experience I thought it might be useful to share our template and some guidelines for what is working for us.

Our cheat sheet

General guidelines

• The point is not to show that your software works but that it is useful and valuable
• Provide context and scenarios so that people can relate to features (role plays work great!)
• Don’t forget there is an element of show and entertainment. If people give up time every 2 weeks to come to your demo make it a good experience for them.
• No smoke and mirrors and never ever show anything that is not 100% done (see definition of done)

Our sprint review agenda

This is our usual flow through the review:

1. The Scrum Master opens the review and reiterates the purpose

• Show what the team has built during the last sprint
• Engage with the audience
• Collect feedback

2. The Product Owner presents what he wanted to get out of the sprint

• Describe the sprint goal and why you chose it
• Explain why it is important for the project and for the company as a whole
• Give people context about where we’re at in the greater scale of things

3. The Scrum Master presents the sprint

• Tell the story of the sprint: How did it go? Did you have level 3 support incidents? (We handle those in a support work time box) Was anyone sick? New team members? Anything else important?
• Give a status of the sprint and an overview of which stories were finished and which ones weren't

Green check means “done”, red cross means not 100% done and therefore won’t be demoed.

4. For each story:

• The demoing team member shows the story description and describes the boundaries (explain the acceptance criteria without reading them out)

The story we are about to demonstrate

• Demonstrate the feature on a real system, in this case generate the report and show the result.
• Take questions and listen to feedback while you demonstrate. Remember to collect ideas for new features and user stories to include on the product backlog.

• Repeat step 4 for all user stories the team finished during the sprint.

On some teams we alternate who is doing the practical demonstrations for each user story, on some we alternate for or each sprint review and on others we always utilise the same team member’s talent for telling stories and guiding people through an entertaining demo. We do whatever works best for each team and audience.

5. Scrum Master closes the demo

• Wrap up and thank people for their attendance and participation
• Communicate the time and date for the next end-of-sprint review.

Some general Tips

Here are some things we have learned during the process of continuously improving our sprint reviews:

• Audience participation and interaction works really well: If possible we ask audience members to play roles in our scenarios such as e.g. a customer who has lost his Snapper card.
• It is really important to prepare. We found out the hard way that it is a good idea to trial the demo before giving it to a larger audience to make sure it flows and that all the accounts, logins and data are set up.
• It is good practice to have the agenda visible on a wall or whiteboard at all times. This serves as a map of the territory we have covered last sprint. It is especially useful if some people come and go during the demonstration (our customer facing folks often do)

In summary, the most important thing to make sure everyone enjoys the sprint review is to focus on demonstrating the value and usefulness of the features we have built and to make sure people can relate to the software by providing context and scenarios.

Where to from here?

As more and more teams within Snapper are using various Agile or Lean approaches and would like to show what they have done since their last demo we are planning to hold bi-monthly combined show and tells.

The plan is that the product development team will demonstrate all features they have finished during the last two weeks and then the marketing team, our latest Scrum addition, will present what they have achieved during their sprint. Ideally, the marketing deliverables will match the product development team’s features.

We will then round up with the operations team who have chosen Kanban as their preferred approach. The ops team will show any major deliverables and will present key metrics such as cycle time, lead time, throughput etc.

The challenge will be to keep the show and tell under an hour and I hope we can keep people engaged, informed and entertained.

Tags: scrum, scrum master, sprint review, show & tell

After my last post on the role of the Scrum Master I have been asked if I could write a similar role description for the Scrum Product Owner.

Here’s my view of the role:

The Product Owner

The product owner is a visionary who can envision the final product and communicate the vision.

The product owner is also the person who sees the vision through to completion. This includes describing features, collaborating and communicating with the delivery team, accepting or rejecting work results, and steering the project by tracking and forecasting its progress.

The Product Owner points the team at the right target, the Scrum Master helps the team get to the target as efficiently as possible. In other words: The product owner is the what-person, the Scrum team are the how-people.
 

In general the Product Owner ...

• is responsible for that the team builds the right product
• manages ROI and makes sure to deliver business benefits
• is responsible for that budget constraints are met
• is responsible for that what the team is asked to build is aligned with what the sponsor, stakeholders and users want
• provides boundaries to describe the realities within which the vision must be realised (e.g. time frames, external quality)
• makes sure management, stakeholders, sponsors are informed and the vision is aligned with their wishes

As a Product Owner you do ...

Some activities I would expect from an experienced Product Owner:

• Provide a vision for the product
• Communicate the project vision to the team
• Motivate the team to subscribe to the product vision
• Communicate the business benefits of the entire product and each individual feature
• Create and maintain the product backlog
• (the product owner can delegate some of the work of writing user stories to a BA but the Product Owner is still responsible that the work is being done and is being done properly)
• Continuously groom the product backlog
• Prioritise the product backlog
• Define releases
• Define release and sprint goals
• Continuously answer questions to add detail to requirements
• Accept/reject developed user stories at the end of the sprint (or during the sprint)
• Communicate about the project within the organisation (e.g. demo attendance and invites, forecasting, management reporting, sponsor liaison )

Here are some great resources I can highly recommend:

• Jeff Patton’s “The Product Owner and the Product Shaped Hole”
• Jeff Patton’s “How you Slice it - Agile Product Design”
• Bill Gaienne’s “3 Ingredients for a Great Product Owner” (10 min training video)

Tags: scrum, product owner, product manager, agile roles, agile

“An adequate Scrum Master can handle two or three teams at the time; a great one can only handle one”. (Michael James - An Example Scrum Master’s checklist)

I found that organisations, teams and new Scrum Masters (even freshly certified ones) often aren’t sure what the Scrum Master role entails and what value it provides.

Here is my attempt to summarize what a good Scrum Master does:

The Scrum Master role

"A Scrum Master is like a conductor coordinating the efforts of musicians, helping them to play together. Some teams are like jazz bands, so they need a leader who encourages improvisation. Some teams are like symphony orchestras, so they need a leader who keeps everyone on the same sheet of music. Conductors have to be deeply familiar with each instrument and with the music, yet they don't play in the band or tell the musicians what to do. They let the music provide detailed guidance; their job is to bring out the best in the musicians, both individually and as a group." (Mike Cohn - Succeeding with Agile)

 In general the Scrum Master ...

• makes sure the team is running (good) Agile development
• assists team members in adopting and improving Agile Development
• helps the team maximise throughput and to work in the best possible way
• protects the team from disturbance and external threats
• is a “servant leader” with no formal authority - all authority is granted by the team
• has no direct authority over Agile development team members but does have authority over the process

As a Scrum Master you do ...

Some activities I would expect from an experienced Scrum Master:

• Remove impediments
• Facilitate meetings (sprint planning, retrospective, review, daily stand-up)
• Coach the team on the Agile development process and make sure the team improves over time (note the caveat “experienced”)
• Re-enforce good practises
• Challenge bad practises and habits and work towards their removal
• Make sure people do what they have agreed to do
• Make sure that the team follow the team ground rules they have defined
• Make sure that quality is a team effort and commitment to the “done” statement is taken seriously
• Provide transparency via the product and sprint backlogs, daily stand-ups, demos and a visible workspace
• Assist in reaching the sprint goal (help with story creation, testing, making coffee, etc if necessary - loads of ad-hoc stuff)
• Ensure that a collaborative culture exists within the team
• Support the Product Owner
• Improve the team’s engineering practices and tools
• Communicate, communicate, communicate
• Smile lots, make people laugh, and make the team feel that you are one of them not an outsider

… as a Scrum Master you are not expected to do all of this yourself but you are responsible for that it happens.

Also, check out Kane Mar’s excellent mind maps of the Scrum Master role here.

Tags: scrum, scrum master, agile roles, agile

The idea

For quite a while I have been waiting for an opportunity to try a 5-why root cause analysis in a sprint retrospective.

The 5-why analysis has its origins within Toyota and lean manufacturing and is used to find the root cause of a problem through identifying a symptom and then repeating the question “Why?” five times. General wisdom and experience state that the nature of a problem and its solution usually become clear after 5 iterations of asking “Why?”.

Here’s an example from wikipedia:

Problem: My car won’t start.

• Why? - The battery is dead.
• Why? - The alternator is not functioning.
• Why? - The alternator belt has broken.
• Why? - The alternator belt was well beyond its useful service life and has never been replaced.
• Why? - I have not been maintaining my car according to the recommended service schedule.

Solution: I will start maintaining my car according to the recommended service schedule.

The plan

I have found 5-why root cause analysis very useful in the past but had never tried it with a group of people or a software development team.

I “conspired” with our very talented Scrum Master and the plan was to share data from previous sprints, analyse the data as a team and see if we could identify a problem. If so, we would suggest a 5-why analysis to see whether it would point us towards a root cause and a solution.

The execution

1) We started by presenting velocity data:

The chart shows our planned (blue) and achieved (red) velocity over the last 10 sprints.

It became obvious that, during the last 4 sprints, we had consistently bitten off way more than we could chew. While it is generally a good thing to strive for what is just out of reach and to improve though practice we thought the gap between attempted goal and real achievement was too big. We certainly didn’t want to lose management’s trust by over-promising and under delivering.

Therefore, we decided to focus on this problem for the remainder of the retrospective.

The problem

The problem was easily summed up as “We over-promise and under-deliver”

The first why: Too many stories are almost done

We came up with two reasons for why we kept over-promising and under-delivering:

1. At the end of the sprint too many stories were “almost” but not entirely done (testing not finished, found a defect, etc)
2. Two of our team members had just gone from 50% to 100% and we overestimated the immediate benefit in terms of velocity

Much like in a decision tree we chose to pursue the path of being left with too many almost finished stories as the other reason was probably a one-off we could safely put into the “shit happens - we have learned” category.

The second why: We are running mini-waterfall

To find out why so many stories were almost but not entirely finished by the end of the sprint we had a look at last sprint’s burndown and cumulative flow diagrammes (I love those Rally reports).

The cumulative flow showed us that by day 4 most of our stories were in progress (yellow) but not many were actually completed (blue and green). Only 2 days before the end of the sprint the majority of stories were completed (blue) and then accepted by the product owner on the very last day (green).

This looked suspiciously like a mini-waterfall process where we first went though a development and then a testing phase.

The problem with any waterfall approach is that it forces feedback towards the end of the time box where it is hardest to react to. This is true for feedback on quality (through testing) and feedback on whether we have correctly understood the needs of our business and users.

The third why: We’re not doing tasks in parallel

We were then asking ourselves why we were running a mini-waterfall process inside a sprint.

Not only were we doing testing at the end but we also seemed to have a problem with co-ordinating GUI (Flex) and backend (web services) work. People found themselves waiting for someone else to finish a task before they were able to pick up the next task to finish the story. Often people decided to work on the next user story rather than wait for someone else to “unblock” them.

We decided we were simply not good enough at working on tasks in parallel to get one specific user story finished.

The forth why: No TDD, test automation and stubbing

People came up with several reasons why we weren’t working on tasks in parallel to get one story “over the line”:

1. Lack of communication
2. Only partial TDD, test automation and stubbing
3. Lack of collective responsibility
4. Not cross-functional enough

As we now had four possible paths to follow we briefly discussed each of them and then did a dot vote on which path to follow. The team decided on number 2: No TDD, test automation and stubbing.

The fifth why: We have an attitude problem

We really went into deep discussions about why we weren’t doing things that everyone knew were good and healthy and after another dot vote amongst several candidates we decided the most relevant root cause was that we had an attitude problem.

We knew what needed to be done, we knew that we needed to make it happen but somehow we hadn’t managed to just get it done yet. Probably because we hadn’t been fully aware of the consequences. We agreed to start fixing the problem immediately.

The solution

More specifically we all agreed to:

1. Ask for help when stuck
2. Accept help gracefully
3. Automate our regression testing (Flexmonkey/RiaTest), do TDD when possible
4. Make more use of stubbing and mocking to be able to develop the front and backend part of a story simultaneously
5. Hand over to the next person after finishing a task, i.e. don’t expect people to see progress from the task wall only; inform the rest of the team when e.g. the web service is finished or the story is ready for testing

My conclusion

Here’s the list of my personal takeaways and things I have learned:

• A 5-why root cause analysis can work amazingly well for a targeted retrospective.
• To avoid any danger of a 5-why retrospective turning into something like the Spanish inquisition it needs to be very well facilitated (Hallelujah for good Scrum Masters :-)
• A 5-why analysis with a group of people will produce a decision tree as there will be mostly more than one answer to each “Why?”.
• Voting to decide on which reason is the most relevant one and should be discussed works well and speeds things up.
• It made my day that I got the opportunity to try this ;-)

I wrote this to illustrate and examplify a retrospective technique that worked extremely well for our team. I think this was one of the best retrospectives I have ever participated in and I hope other people will give it a shot and share their experiences.

Tags: agile, retrospectives, mini-waterfall, root cause analysis, inspect & adapt, lean, kaizen

Last week I presented at WebDU in Sydney. The conference was excellently organised by Geoff and the Daemon guys and I met lots of interesting people. And I love Sydney! In short I had a blast.

Apart from a workshop on user stories I presented on 10 ways to fail with Agile. Judging by the Twitter stream my presentation about the most common mistakes and pitfalls during Agile adoption and how to avoid them has been well received (okay, they also tweeted I looked like Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica Season 1 ;-)

As promised here is a version of my slides which more than just pretty pictures ...

10 ways to fail with Agile on Prezi

Tags: organisations, agile, failure, inspect & adapt, adoption, transition, scrum

People keep asking me whether I’d run all projects using an agile framework such as Scrum.

When I answer “of course not” they often not only expect but gently try to steer me towards an answer that excludes certain type of projects: “You certainly wouldn’t use it for a mission critical system, would you? Or a compliance project? Or an infrastructure project? “

Actually, yes! I have used Scrum for business critical systems at a major mobile phone manufacturer, have implemented mission critical systems for a publicly owned European Rail Cargo company, a friend of mine has successfully delivered a compliance project and another one has even developed fighter jet control systems for a European Air Force using scrum.

It’s not about the type of project. It’s not even about the size of your project. It’s about whether you’re willing and able to create a setup that allows agile projects to succeed. To me the rather vague terms of organisational and cultural readiness can be narrowed down to a list of primary show stoppers:

I’d NOT run agile if ...

• People on the team are not fully allocated and committed to the project
• You can’t stack a great team and only get the people that everybody else wants to get rid of (Give me some of the company “stars” even if it’s just to show commitment and get me agile personalities!)
• You don’t have the courage to let the team make decisions, to allow them to learn by making mistakes and to trust them to get the job done - you’re stuck in command control
• You don’t have a business person who has the time, courage and authority to work with the team and to make quick decisions
• You expect instant success and need a silver bullet (Sorry to be the one to bring it to you but if your project is impossible or if you don’t have good people no methodology or framework is going to help you ;-)

There are of course numerous other things that are important for agile teams to succeed but usually there are work-arounds for non-ideal situations.

If I don’t meet any of the above obstacles I’ll go for Agile any time!

What’s your list of show stoppers or essential requirements for running an agile project?

Tags: organisations, governance, obstacles , change, agile, scrum

I was recently asked by a friend how to pick an Agile team.

My friend is a project manager within a New Zealand government department and to deliver an important project he was given complete freedom of choice with regards to project methodology and people.

He chose Agile and Scrum as a delivery framework and needed 8 people to form his dream team. The big question was which people to pick and which skills to focus on.

I've never been fortunate enough to pick my own scrum team. Normally, I get a certain degree of choice and then a combination of who happens to be available and people who I really, really fight for. And sometimes I fight to avoid getting someone on the team. 

Having complete freedom I think I'd focus on: 

1. Personality and work attitude - people who are solution oriented, like to deliver, like to succeed, are easy to work with, can communicate and just get the job done
2. People who like each other or have a chance of getting along, i.e. have respect for each other and can have fun together 
3. Absolutely no primadonnas: We can all be flexible and accommodate a lot but the lone genius who lives by his own rules just does not work (I usually remove them and I have never regretted it)
4. People who are confident enough to handle the visibility and transparency that come with Scrum

Sure, people should be qualified and good at what they do but it is much easier to teach people skills than to perform personality transplants. 

Tags: agile, team, personality, transparency, visibility