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.
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.
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.
Project Success Sliders - A Simple Tool
This very visual tool from Mountain Goat Software proved its value yet again for my teams yesterday when our business partners indicated that “Meeting Quality Requirements” was #1 and that “Delivering on Budget and on Time” were at the bottom of their expectations.
Give it a try at your next project kick-off. Perhaps it will set a tone to follow throughout the entire life of your next project.
PMI Further Embraces Agile
It’s not breaking news that the PMI has been embracing Agile over the last few years. They look at the adoption of Agile methods as providing more “tools in the toolbox” to successfully manage projects. They are absolutely correct.
The greatest thing about the PMI Agile Certification is that it further legitimizes Agile as the most popular, trending and successful project management framework.
Scrum Certification is great, but a sponsorship from the most recognized project management group in the world goes much further to dispel the myths of Agile and provide even more credibility.
Book Review: Managing Agile Projects - Kevin Aguanno
Kevin Aguanno’s “Managing Agile Projects” is a must read for the modern project manager. Notice that I didn’t say Scrum Master or Agile Guru. No this book is refreshingly unbiased and although written for an Agile audience, pays tribute to the incorporation and value of some traditional methods.
Kevin’s book illustrates project management from a 360 degree viewpoint where he disputes the need to be polarizing with just one way of doing things when it comes to project or program management. The book explores the empowering and self managed aspects of agile frameworks while also counter-balancing with the need for some process, some understandable controls and some necessary policy when projects scale or when more traditional planning exercises can benefit an agile project and are worth the early investment.
The book effectively straddles both the world of the Agile-purist and the Traditional detailed planner giving credit to both, but it answers and provides direction to solving the one, big question we face in software projects, “Are traditional methods working effectively and if not, how can Agile improve delivery?”
There isn’t an Information Technology shop in the world who doesn’t face this challenge. Kevin’s book is a great tool in the arsenal to help provide some of the answers to moving the needle closer to a satisfactory solution for all of us who want to do it faster, better and cheaper.
Give it a read.
GAO and VA Squabble Over Agile Development Project, Procedures.
Agile is a framework of never ending improvement exercises. It simply doesn’t end with attempting Agile (or any method, process, framework or methodology) once and abandoning it without a learning and refinement effort.
Show me something that works better.
