Project Management

Trying to be Agile

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A blog about my experiences with agile project management as I continue on my Shu Ha Ri journey. I will share experiences from clients (anonymously of course) along with my reflections as I inspect and adapt.

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Halfway Pregnant

Designed to Succeed

Beginning the Agile Journey

Productivity through the Pomodoro technique

Trying to be Agile - first post

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agile, Disciplined Agile Delivery, personal productivity

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Designed to Succeed

When I first started doing agile, I applied the Scrum approach pretty faithfully. I’d capture my user stories, get my product owner to prioritize them, and get the first iteration planned. On small, straight-forward projects, this was all that was needed.
 
As I got into bigger, more complex projects, things didn’t always go so smoothly. I can remember one particular project, when we were in iteration 5 and realized that our focus on just user stories brought about a gap with the technical aspects of the project. Having a simple design and refactoring wasn’t enough. We needed to do a bit more design up front.
 
That’s where Disciplined Agile Deliver (DAD) comes in. DAD is a hybrid of techniques such as Scrum and Extreme Programming, as well as techniques such as Agile Modeling.
 
One of the roles in DAD is the Architect Owner. This is the person that owns the architectural decisions and priorities.
 
So what I’m doing now on projects with more technical complexity is bringing in an architect at the beginning, so as the user stories are being captured, someone is also looking at the project from a technical perspective and coming up with a high-level design of things like integrations with other systems, database requirements, and ensuring the architecture aligns with the organizations architecture standards. This helps reduce the risk, which is always a good thing.
Posted on: January 07, 2015 08:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Productivity through the Pomodoro technique

Categories: personal productivity

The Pomodoro technique is not something unique to agile, but it's one of those productivity techniques that agilist know about and use. I'd group it in the personal productivity category along with other technuques like personal kanban. It actually works well with personal kanban.

I was recently using this for an important tasks I had to get done. I had a report to write and not a lot of time to do it. So I took advantage of pomodoro to focus on the task at hand.

If you're not familiar with that the idea is that you sit down for 25 minutes completely focused. You don't let distractions like email or instant messaging keep you from doing that work. At the end of 25 minutes you take a five-minute break. This is your chance to check email or look at your Twitter feed or whatever you want to do. You continue this for usually three or four cycles and then you take a longer break. It's that simple.

I find the 25 minutes don't seem overwhelming in terms of how long I'm working on something and the breaks come pretty quick. But I also feel that this approach helps me to stay focused longer, rather than trying to work on something for an hour or more at a time without taking a break. I find for 25 minutes I'm able to keep distractions away. When I'm not using the technique and working for longer periods of time, I find distractions creep in on me.

There are apps you can find for you smartphone, or simple get a basic kitchen timer. The technique is named because of the tomato shaped kitchen timer the originator of the technique used...pomodoro being the Italian word for tomato.

Posted on: September 14, 2014 03:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
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