program selection system

Without a doubt, agile processes rely on effective collaborative teams. But we can’t just throw a group of individuals together and expect an agile team to just happen. It takes knowledge of team strategies, skillful team building and ongoing coaching to build and maintain high-performing agile teams.

Salesforce.com took a big bang approach to implement a SCRUM method, with huge success. This meant big changes to how Product Managers work, how we interact with the team, and manages dependencies between teams.

No more 200 page functional specs, no more waiting 12-18 months before features got into customers hands. No more changes to the release dates – how do we survive?

Metrics can backfire. They are useful for both self assessment and retrospectives. But experience since 2002 with 80 teams at IBM has shown it’s not just a matter of finding the right metrics. It’s important to use them properly, and avoid common pitfalls, including bloated metrics, the evil scorecard, lessons forgotten, forcing process, and inconsistent sharing. Turning assessments into “un-assessments” returns power back to the team. Instead of defining more metrics, this paper tells how not to misuse them.

Where are those fantastic, self-propelled teams that were promised by agile? Where they were missing, we took action. It was sometimes difficult. Along the way, not all the pegs fit into their corresponding holes. In many respects, we had been our own worst enemy by allowing poor behaviors and poor teams to manifest themselves before and after scrum. In hindsight, Kelley Blue Book applied an informal intervention model which was useful to address our team deficiencies. Self-organizing teams didn’t just happen - we had to help them along.

Abstract

Over the last few years we have had the good fortune to aggressively apply the agile practices on a number of projects with great success. These successes, however, have not been achieved without challenges and lessons learnt along the way. This experience report specifically highlights examples from three different software development projects of varying sizes within this period and within the same organization. This is the story of three little pigs, where in all cases the pigs were well and truly committed.

Having worked as an Agile Mentor for some years, I have discovered a pattern for how I help teams navigate on their journey from from traditional processes towards Agile values and methods. I have discovered, that I can turn most teams into fullblown agile teams, by helping them in 8 different steps - and I have seen, that this takes me 10-15 days during a period of 2-3 months. The early steps are more learning than doing, but that quickly changes - and I stand back, facilitate and support the team and the customers while they are estimating, prioritising, plannning, etc.

Dancing with the Agile Bitch Goddess

Israel Gat, BMC Software

I present agile practices—KPT, Estimate Retrospectives, Positive Strokes, Iteration Planning, Darts, Task Kanban, and Overtime Tickets—that I have actually practiced in a project where I worked as a Technical Lead. I also discuss the benefits and careful points we experienced when implementing these practices from the viewpoint such as team building and leader’s mind-set.

“None of the number of people, technology nor a power of money will complete this construction after all. It is the people’s feelings which we can only rely on.”

A high-volume online poker system deployed prematurely and crashing every day. 50 (fifty!) consultants thrown in near the end to rush the release. The worst code anybody in the project had ever seen. Team members working 80 hour weeks.

This is what I saw when I started as CTO of a Swedish gaming company. 3 days into the job we crashed the national poker tournament and were thrashed in the tabloids. A few days later I was notified that half my team would have to go, just in time for christmas. Oh, and someone promised media that we would re-run the national poker tournament within 5 weeks.

We start by introducing the purpose alignment model. By characterizing activities by mission criticality and market differentiation, we show how organizations can discover and align with organizational strategy to focus their activities and improve their effectiveness. Next we introduce the key attributes and techniques for leading collaboration to create an environment where teams can be creative, innovative and productive.