Welcome to Agile Colony. These are my thoughts, opinions, experience and viewpoints about Leadership, Corporate Culture, Agile Software frameworks, Technology Trends and other various aspects of Business Technology.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
Global Agility made easier via Trello.
My global teams use Trello’s free taskboarding software to manage scrum teams, defect and production support groups, portfolio management and much more. Trello provides a simple and elegant way to manage all of our workstreams effortlessly.
Why Digital Talent Doesn’t Want To Work At Your Company
Why doesn’t digital talent want to work at your company? It’s not because you’re a consumer packaged goods company, rather than Google. It’s not because you’re in Ohio instead of Silicon Valley. It’s not because your salaries are too low, or because you don’t offer free food and laundry services. It’s because you’re not providing them the right opportunity. The talent you want would be happy to work in an un-air-conditioned garage in New Mexico if it meant the chance to change the world.
Annual Budgeting and Agile IT, Part II: Why Agile Gets Compromised When It Goes Corporate
From: The Agile Manager (Ross Pettit)
In corporate IT, the CFO isn’t trying to solve a “make better use of capital” problem in the business. He or she is trying to solve a “consistent cash flow from operations to service our capital obligations” problem. When Agile goes corporate, it is subservient to, and most often compromised by, that latter problem.
Beware of Agile Job Postings…
“Wanted, Agile Project Manager…or Agile Expert/Guru, Agile Coach/Trainer or Certified Scrum Master”…sounds awesome right? Perhaps.
Most jobs requiring agile knowledge and expertise genuinely do come from true agile shops or shops that have hit the wall with other methods and sincerely want to make the transition, but be careful, know the warning signs of “not so agile” or “agile wanna-be” shops.
Agile has been all the rage for many years, it’s really old news. Startups and small companies don’t know anything but agile frameworks and in my experience, execute scrum/xp, FDD, Kanban and other frameworks to the letter. It’s the big I.T. houses that worry me the most. I am a huge fan of them taking the steps towards Agile methods, but when I see things in job postings such as:
“Experience with all phases of the project management lifecycle”
“Must be able to work in both Waterfall and Agile environments”
“Proven ability to manage both matrix and direct resources”
“Six Sigma and/or PMI certification”
“Expertise required in Microsoft Project”
…I have to think a big, “Say What?” on all counts. These are not bad requests, they make sense for a lot of companies, but a true agile company? That doesn’t seem right at all. There’s a lot of “heavy weight” process assumption in those statements. There’s also a “we can’t staff projects with 100% dedicated resources” sound with using the term “matrix resources”. Microsoft Project? Really? I would have expected ScrumWorks, VersionOne…how about even Xplanner?
One could dismiss most of this If there were a disclaimer or a requirement in the posting that clearly stated this is a company making the transition to agile.
In short, read the fine print. There are many great agile shops delivering working product in tight iterations with high quality and not all the compliance and administrative needs. Look before you leap or you might land in a staunchly traditional development shop posing as one that practices agile properly. It is a VERY common reality my agile purist friends.
Stop Blaming Waterfall | Agile Zone
Here’s a reblog of an all too tired debate. I agree with the author’s premise that Agile projects can tank just as well as Waterfall based projects. An inclusion of the best of each framework tends to be the best course for many large organizations struggling with Agile adoption.
In the end, its rarely the project methodology and more the team/leadership of the project that must assume ownership for the outcome.
Why Your Company Should Do An Internal Hackathon
The rules were simple: pitch an idea, form teams, build something, then demo it 30 hours later. The winning team would get a prize.
10 Lessons In IT Strategy From Ex-HP CIO Randy Mott
Some very timeless advice from one of the most top-ranked CIOs.
Agile, when all else fails, “Just Stand Up”
If you don’t have the luxury of working for a true, agile organization or you are struggling with an agile transformation from predictive methodologies, take a huge step back and focus on one tenant of agility; the Daily Stand Up Meeting.
So many companies (especially larger firms) fail to incorporate agile in their I.T. departments because it requires such a broad change in thinking, style and execution. Asking hundreds of developers, testers and especially management to make these changes is difficult. So much buy-in is required across larger corporations that what tends to happen is that an I.T. department will have a certain percentage of people using agile and the rest resisting passively or actively by using more traditional delivery methods. No harm, no foul, change is hard.
So take another route. Just ask every project team to use the short, daily stand up meeting used by all agile frameworks. I suggest this because the stand up meeting is cheap, easy, quick and within days, makes total sense to all participants. It makes sense because people realize quickly that for a minimal effort on their part, the team generates a massive amount of daily “group intelligence” for the project. Everyone knows what every team member is working on and what they will do next. The entire team knows the constraints and the gravity issues immediately, every day.
This one tenant of agile is so basic, so simplistic in design, yet yields so much data to project managers and upper management who participate.
If you’re struggling in “big corporate” with agile, don’t use a hammer, just allow people to find their own way with agile practices that help all types of project management styles without labeling it, “agile”. Sometimes the word “agile” is polarizing. Let this one, common sense meeting do all the talking for you. You’ll be amazed how quickly you see stand up meetings popping up around your company and your coworkers will have that “ah ha” moment on their own.
The Agile Stand Up Meeting - common sense, easy to do, lots to gain.
Four Reasons Not to Jailbreak Your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad(via @Lifehacker)
We love jailbreaking our iPhones, iPod touches, and iPads because it opens up it opens up so many great new possibilities. It also has the potential to cause a lot of problems and headaches.
