Agile Transitions

The online community for agile business leaders

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  • Delegation, Meet Agile
    Blog Entry posted February 5, 2012 by Elena Yatzeck , tagged Agile Transitions in Agile Transitions Blog public
    Delegation, Meet Agile

    You might not expect to encounter the "delegation" concept in a blog post about agile software development.  After all, agile is all about the "self governing team."  But in the real world, if you are in a company which is transitioning to agile, and you are the project manager of a newly created agile team, you may well need to consider how to create a situation around your team that allows self-governance to emerge without making you completely crazy.  In real life, your first few weeks with your agile team can seem like your worst nightmare.  This is not because there is something wrong with you.  This is completely predictable.  Stop blaming yourself.

    If your team is used to having you, as a project manager, take all the responsibility, and you suddenly stop telling people what to do, (along with not setting up their meetings, not taking their notes, and not getting them a projector every single time for every single meeting), you should not expect them to do what is needed, no matter what the Agile Founding Fathers say.  Instead, your team members, being humans, will go ahead and take advantage of you and do whatever they feel like doing.  And remember, they are under a bunch of stress themselves with this whole "agile transformation" thing, so you're not seeing them at their best.

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  • No-Blender Zone: Cross-Functional Doesn't Mean...
    Blog Entry posted January 22, 2012 by Elena Yatzeck , tagged Agile Transitions in Agile Transitions Blog public
    No-Blender Zone: Cross-Functional Doesn't Mean Homogenous

    In the glory days when giants still walked the earth and the Agile Founding Fathers created "the team," they decreed that there would be three "team roles:"

    • The Product Owner
    • The Scrum Master
    • The Team

    The product owner would be omnipresent and omni-knowledgeable, the scrum master would (somewhat mysteriously) "move boulders and carry water," and the team itself, the AFFs explained, would be "cross-functional."  Without being told how, the team would just swarm around the work and get it done:  analysis, design, development, testing, release, the works.  Boo-yah!

     

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  • Road Rage: You and Your New Agile Teammates
    Blog Entry posted January 15, 2012 by Elena Yatzeck , tagged Agile Transitions in Agile Transitions Blog public
    Road Rage: You and Your New Agile Teammates

    As you join your teammates in your sparkling new agile team room, and you all do your best to quickly "become agile," I guarantee that despite being surrounded by brightly colored index cards and sticky notes, you may sometimes feel...angry.  Here you are, supposedly liberated to be "self managing," out from under the collective thumbs of your corporate hierarchy, and you realize that you are reminded briefly of the Lord of the Flies

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  • The Product Owner as a Body Politic
    Post posted November 30, 2011 by Elena Yatzeck in Enterprise Agile Adoption public

    I've been having many conversations recently about how to set up the agile teams I'm coaching with the right Product Owner.  As we all know, the PO must be empowered to make decisions, yet must also be knowledgeable enough about what the software should do that she can make constant small decisions for the team so they don't have to wait.  The PO understands the big picture, understands the small picture, and can set priorities.

    I blogged a few months back about how the "Team Room" must be considered a metaphor, not a literal prerequisite to trying agile for the first time.  I know I am treading on equally sacred ground (stepping into equally sacred cow pies), but I am going to posit along the same lines that in a complex corporate environment, the "Product Owner" should be considered as a small village, not a literal person.  (I hear the sounds of distant drums, or maybe bagpipes, preparing for war).  I believe if the village can reach consensus and speak with one voice in a timely way on a consistent basis, the whole agile development team will be in fine shape.  The trick is building the right village.

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  • Enterprise Value Spikes for the Product Owner
    Post posted November 22, 2011 by Elena Yatzeck in Enterprise Agile Adoption public

    I've been pondering further difficulties of being a product owner, both silently and aloud, so yesterday I was happily bowled over by a new idea on the topic from my new ThoughtWorks colleague Jasper "Dutch" Steutel (@dutchdutchdutch for twitterphiles).  He calls his discovery the "design spike," and I call it a "value spike."  So what's this all about?  Aside from being "Vampire Month" on the Pragmatic Agilist?

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  • How BDD and Feature Injection can help you be a better...
    Blog Entry posted November 15, 2011 by Elena Yatzeck in Agile Transitions Blog public
    How BDD and Feature Injection can help you be a better Product Owner

    Product Ownership is very difficult.  Take a big step away from the Agile Manifesto and think for a moment about project stakeholders, user stories, and how they don't fit together as neatly in real life as they do in Mike Cohn's User Stories Applied, as awesome as that book is.  How in the world is it possible for there to be a single person standing in for all project stakeholders in negotiating with the team?

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  • Roles with Teeth
    Blog Entry posted November 10, 2011 by Elena Yatzeck , tagged Agile Transitions in Agile Transitions Blog public
    Roles with Teeth

    As a trainer, I have noticed that when I start the "Roles, Personas and Goals" discussions, attendees in the room are 40% more likely to start surreptitiously checking e-mail their smartphones than they when we talk about comparatively exciting topics such as "stand up meetings," "story boards," the "burn up versus burn down chart" debate, or "evolutionary design."   I had to lure you to this blog post, in fact, by riding on the coat-tails of the Breaking Dawn, Part 1, premier tonight at midnight.  You aren't interested!   You have heard it all before!  "To write good software, you need to know who will be using it and what they want to accomplish."  Blah blah blah--sounds like something your mom would say.   "Give the roles names, and think of them as people.  If multiple types of people play the same roles, give them different names, and call those things 'personas'"  Now you sound trendy and slightly unhinged.  Let's go back to the burn-ups.

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  • Does Velocity Kill Agile?
    Post posted November 4, 2011 by Elena Yatzeck in Enterprise Agile Adoption public

    Jim Highsmith recently posited that "velocity is killing agility!" which is kind of a fun hypothesis.  Jim observes that company leaders he talks with around the world these days are a little too quick to measure the effectiveness of their agile software development teams by keeping track of the teams' velocity (the average amount of estimated software effort the team delivers per software delivery iteration).

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  • ThoughtWorks Summit: "Agile Fundamentals for...
    Post posted October 27, 2011 by Adam Monago , tagged Events, Leadership, Transitioning to Agile in Enterprise Agile Adoption public

    Thank you everyone who attended the Summit and extended the ThoughtWorks Team a warm welcome.  We enjoyed the hearty discussion and look forward to seeing you again.

    Attached is the deck for the Agile Fundamentals for Leaders section.  Continuous Delivery fans will be interested in watching this video which covers the material from Tim's presentation and more!

    Stay tuned to this page for answers to some of the questions we did not get to during the session.

    Warm Regards,

    Adam

  • Iteration Showcases for Backend Systems
    Post posted October 22, 2011 by Elena Yatzeck in Enterprise Agile Adoption public

    Let's say you are in charge of the "services" operation within the IT department of a large enterprise.  You're a government entity, a telecommunications giant, or some other titan of industry.  Other IT organizations have grown up around you in the enterprise over time, and they're writing cute little front-ends that get information from customers to your services, and pass the results back.  They're doing iPods and tablets, and you're still dealing with Cobol.  Your colleagues are all concerned with "cascading style sheets" and "user experience" and color schemes and the like, but you're doing all the grungy, large-scale back-end work that actually causes the money to pour into your organization and keep you all paid.

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