The Agile School

Agile teams work in iterations. During this period, they are supposed to work on product increments which can be “delivered” at the end of iteration. But how you know that the correct product was delivered? Many teams have different kinds of acceptance criteria and Definition of Done (DoD). But in many cases, this “done” is not the real “done” there might be some testing pending, some integration or review pending or anything else which prevents the actual use of the product increment. Many of these teams will need additional iterations to finish hardening their products. Many teams will implement different types of “gates” or approval steps to move to next stage. The free flow of product will be interrupted. They might end up doing mini waterfall within their agile process. Many don’t even realize this. This results in poor quality and requires additional effort to “harden” the product. Potentially Shippable Product increment The acceptance criteria and DoD should be modified...

Daily stand up meeting serves a very important role in agile teams. In a way they are the risk mitigation meeting. Team members talk about the risk for the iteration and overall product delivery. The need of a daily stand up for a new team and a matured team is different and hence the need for different rules for different teams. Teams who are starting the agile/scrum journey needs a lot of help. They might be new to agile or might be working together with each other for the first time. A structured well-defined set of rules will help them grow. For such teams the following rules are more than enough Daily Scrum Meeting Rules - http://www.theagileschool.com/2012/03/daily-scrum-meeting-rules.html   Daily scrum misconception, scrum meeting objectives and different stages of meeting http://www.theagileschool.com/2012/03/daily-scrum-misconception-scrum-meeting.html Only team members are “allowed” to speak and scrum master should be present to help the team. This rule im...

Lot of companies start on the Agile transformation and find it very difficult. Some even go back to their old process. I have seen this in lot of "large" companies who have "established" process which they are following for many years. Process control Most of these companies have lots of process, checklists and control to manage the "work" which is then  manged by complex hierarchy of "mangers".  Many feel empowered by this complex multi-layer organizational hierarchy. I always wondered how actual works gets done, if any,  in such environment. Such companies  will be slow and costly and will end up like dinosaurs. An Agile/DevOps transformation for  such companies is very difficult. The people connection In today's knowledge industry people are the most critical and important part of any company. The old process thrives with rigid rule and checklists. They focus on finding tools or solutions to meet the objective usually ignoring...

Many large companies make the fundamental mistake of scaling agile without understanding the whole idea behind agile principles. Being large shouldn't prevent you from looking at the fundamentals. I have heard many highly paid "agile" consultants say that the agile principles and process is all theory and the "big" companies should do things in a different way. After many years of "transformation" and pocketing lots of consulting dollars they will still complain about organizational inertia and lack of support. The moment they leave the company the entire "agile journey"  will go in reverse direction.  The objective of transformations shouldn't be to support any tool or any framework or tied to custom "enterprise" agile SDLC.   The transformation should focus on individuals, teams and products. Equip them with modern tools , train them on Agile and DevOps principles and encourage them to learn from their mistakes. Guide th...

Microsoft has rapidly rising revenues and today is the most valuable firm on the planet—worth more than a trillion dollars. In 2004, I would never have predicted this. At the time, I was visiting Microsoft for a short consultancy. I was shocked to find how bureaucratic it was. After working for several decades in another notorious bureaucracy, I knew the problems bureaucracy caused. But Microsoft was worse: it was impossible to get decisions from within a labyrinth of silos and layers that called to mind Kafka’s  The   Castle . What can other big old firms learn from Microsoft’s escape from bureaucratic strangulation? According to  The Economist , the reason for Microsoft’s turnaround is that Satya Nadella, the CEO since 2014, took the bold decisions of a heroic leader. He opted not to rely on the existing business (Windows) and chose not to be “rapacious.” The more important lesson for most big old corporations, though, is not so much the individual decisions o...

Software development has been experiencing disruptive innovation over the last few years, and with the rising expectations of customers looking to get a superior experience, they are always searching for ways to release their products with faster time to market. According to a  Forrester study conducted in 2012 , 17% of entrepreneurs need strategic IT services or software products, delivered in less than 3 months from basics to production, and a few expect the same in 3-6 months. In this post, we will try to explain the real reasons behind this shift; both from the business and from a technology perspective, plus we will also cover the tools and processes that leading-edge companies are using to stay ahead of the competition. The Business Need It has become inevitable for all industries to deliver superior customer experience, and deliver it fast, in order to stay competitive. As well, continuous innovation is required to meet customers' expectations and the market needs....

Agile innovation methods have revolutionized information technology. Over the past 25 to 30 years they have greatly increased success rates in software development, improved quality and speed to market, and boosted the motivation and productivity of IT teams. Now agile methodologies—which involve new values, principles, practices, and benefits and are a radical alternative to command-and-control-style management—are spreading across a broad range of industries and functions and even into the C-suite. National Public Radio employs agile methods to create new programming. John Deere uses them to develop new machines, and Saab to produce new fighter jets. Intronis, a leader in cloud backup services, uses them in marketing. C.H. Robinson, a global third-party logistics provider, applies them in human resources. Mission Bell Winery uses them for everything from wine production to warehousing to running its senior leadership group. And GE relies on them to speed a much-publicized transit...

Budgeting, as most corporations practice it, should be abolished.” —Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser,  Harvard Business Review , 2003 The budget often constitutes one of the last—and largest—stumbling blocks to creating a truly Agile organization. Budgeting as practiced in most large organizations today is cumbersome, expensive, time-consuming and wasteful. It often cripples innovation. It is riddled with gaming-the-system. It encourages unnecessary spending and fosters sub-optimal targets. It hides accountability. It is demoralizing to the participants, inefficient, ineffective, built on fictions, and fundamentally at odds with the dynamic of business agility. None of this is new. Way back in 2003, Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser wrote as much in  Harvard Business Review . Yet traditional budgeting remains entrenched in big organizations, even those implementing Agile. Why? A key reason is that budgeting interlocks with other aspects of the internal bureaucracy. R...

Lighting Corporate Passion: Everything you need to know about FedEx Day Introduction  A FedEx Day is a 24-hour event in which employees deliver innovation to the company they work for. It is called FedEx Day, because you have to deliver overnight, like the parcel delivery company. A FedEx Day is a fixed time box in which people are not disturbed for regular work. Within this time box, employees have total autonomy over the project they are enthusiastic about. They decide for themselves what they will be working on, who they are going to work with, and how they are going to do it. Only one rule applies:  People who sign up show the results to the company at the end of the FedEx Day. In short, a FedEx Day is about boosting motivation and creativity overnight by getting out of people’s way. Business Model The traditional business model regarding motivation is built around external motivators, the carrot and-stick motivation scheme. For simple, mechanical tasks,...

I have seen this conflict in many organizations which are new to Scrum/Agile. Most of them are transitioning to agile methodologies from the traditional methods. It’s very difficult for that management to let go the power hierarchy. They still want one single neck to catch. They never believed in collective thinking. Rather than motivation , their believe in pressure to get the work done. Such dysfunctions exists in most of the organizations, scrum just exposes it. ScrumMaster doesn’t run the scrum. He/She should help build a team, bring out the leaders in every member of your team. ScrumMaster helps the team to self-organize so that they can move forward without the classic “delay” of waiting for decisions. ScrumMaster is not a person who can be used as a single neck to catch or blame. Scrum is a collective team approach. If it succeeds everyone succeeds if it fails everyone fails. ScrumMasters in such an environment have to do a critical job in the transition. You will have ...

A relatively new person to scrum asked me this question last day. My answer to that person was yes. But really does the scrum have any rules? Scrum is a framework which helps us in developing software. It has very few rules and apart from those basic rules rest of them are guidelines like best practices. Some of the rules  The roles of Scrum • Scrum Master -  http://www.theagileschool.com/2012/03/scrummasters-checklist-roles.html • Product Owner • Feature Team The PDCA cycle ( http://www.theagileschool.com/2012/05/pdca-scrum-or-agile-why-is-it-important.html  )  frequent communication about risks (daily) • Plan – Sprint planning • Do – Actual engineering sprint – deliver a potential shippable code • Check – Sprint review • Act – Retrospective  The scrum guide @ http://www.scrum.org/Scrum-Guides will be a good guideline for teams/companies planning to start scrum. If you are following the recommendation in these then you are following scrum. A...

The PDCA (Plan DO Check Act) cycle was made popular by Dr. W. Edwards Deming. This is a scientific cyclic process which can be used to improve the process (or product). This is cyclic in nature and usually time boxed. Plan  This is the first stage of the process. During this step the team discusses the objectives, the process and the clear conditions of exit (conditions of acceptance). This stage sets the measurable and achievable goals for the team. DO Team works together to achieve the objective set in the planning phase. Team works with the set of agreed process. Check Once the implantation is done team regroups and verifies the output and compares it to the agreed conditions of acceptance decided during the planning phase. The deviation, if any, is noted down. ACT If any deviation in planned tasks is observed during the Check stage, a root cause analysis is conducted. Team brainstorms and identifies the changes required to prevent such deviatio...

I have a simple guideline for this Leave it to the teams - unsynchronized sprints Simple products with single teams working on it If you have a different independent products which rarely or doesn’t communicate with each other. Team will be more creative and it gives more flexibility. Because of all these unsynchronized releases there will be lot of churn so the management & PMO should use a lot of common sense in dealing with such cycles. Use synchronized sprints If you have a big product, with multiple teams working on it  If you a product portfolio of products/applications which communicates with each other  If you want to synchronize the release because of billing, reporting or any other similar reasons    Synchronization helps in large organization where we have to worry about lot of complexities. They will have a common reporting tool which can provide the correct view across all the teams. This helps in billing and other administrativ...