As part of an ongoing series on retrospectives, Managing Consultant Brian Hicks offers four reasons why functional teams often overlook tracking retrospective action items.
As part of an ongoing series on retrospectives, Managing Consultant Brian Hicks offers four reasons why functional teams often overlook tracking retrospective action items.
A common misunderstanding among those new to agile is exactly what the role of the ScrumMaster is on the team. I have often heard people say, “I didn’t sign up to be a ScrumMaster; it’s not my job to talk to the product owner,” or “I’m not the ScrumMaster; I don’t like to act like […]
A common misunderstanding among those new to agile is exactly what the role of the scrum master is on the team. I have often heard the phrases: “I didn’t sign up to be a scrum master; it’s not my job to talk to the product owner” or “I’m not the scrum master; I don’t like […]
Everywhere I go, everyone seems to agree that the Daily Scrum should not be a status meeting. However, a consistent complaint I hear is, “our daily standup has become a status meeting.” How did we get here? Part of the problem is the typical guidance given to Scrum Masters about facilitating this meeting. This guidance […]
There are lots of good practices that people will tell you aren’t agile. Usually this comes from people who read a book on Scrum or Extreme Programming and took it literally. But agile is not methods and tools associated with a particular methodology; as long as you follow the agile principles, anything is fair game.
Most of the organizations I work with are embracing agile or some variant of lean development and delivery. While agile has been around for a while, there are still several organizations that are just beginning their agile transformation journey or are continuing to refine their agile practices. In the Scrum implementation of agile, we have […]
When I teach classes on root causes of agile project failure, I’m often asked which of the causes is most difficult to overcome. From an enterprise perspective, that is an easy answer: bad culture. Sociologist Ron Westrum defines culture as “the patterned way that an organization responds to its challenges, whether these are explicit (for […]
It’s difficult for an agile team comprised solely of specialists to be fully productive. If team members are unable to help others with their tasks, the team will not maximize its potential. The agile community calls team members who are capable of working in a variety of roles generalized specialists. A generalized specialist is not […]
In working with one of the teams at one of my current clients, the team said they didn’t want to do Scrum. At this organization, there is a lot of Scrum. Most of the teams there are Scrum teams. The team in question decided that Scrum wasn’t working for them. They wanted to try something […]
