Holding a retrospective during a crisis is a completely different process than it is during less stressful times. As a PM, you should be aware of the appropriate methods to use when this happens. A practitioner from Ukraine shares her experiences.
Are you a stickler for "agile rules" when using agile project management? Don't be! That's just one of the lessons this practitioner has learned over the years through hands-on experience succeeding—and failing—while working on agile efforts.
Scrum masters and project managers can form a formidable leadership team on agile initiatives. But how does that relationship and scrum master’s role evolve in a hybrid environment? For one, more attention to coaching and less to process.
Sprint planning is an important part of the agile process, but too often it’s treated as a perfunctory step to simply add stories to the upcoming sprint. Instead, teams should include goals, value and uncertainty in the discussion—and get much more out of it.
Question: I am going to head a team on a large, corporate project that will involve multiple teams. The problem is that we are not all going to be using the same methods of project management, and I am concerned about how we will be able to work together if we are not all following the same processes. Is it possible for various parts of the organization to work in different ways and still produce a good product?
Prototyping, scrum, SAFE, kanban...it's easy to get confused these days. Here we walk through some of the main project methodologies used for IT projects today and give a little history of each—with some recommendations for when each methodology might be most appropriate.
Question: Even as we begin to emerge from the challenges of the past year, it is becoming obvious that things will never go back to exactly how they were in the past. My company wants me to use more agile approaches, along with our past predictive ones, to make us more flexible. But while I agree in concept, I’m not too sure how this would work in practice. Any suggestions?
Does the Daily Scrum help your team grow, or do they waste time? Here is some insight on the importance of holding Daily Scrums—and how you can actually use them as a tool for team cohesion.
In agile product development, we try to work on fewer things and stick with them until we finish. Rapid priority shifts are expensive and demoralizing. But that’s not always clear on the go-to-market side, so we need stories like the Hungry Man Parable to build better understanding.
Question: We are starting a project that is part hardware and part software driven. The organization has asked me if we want to use a traditional approach or a more flexible version like agile. It seems to me that the production line would benefit more from one and the IT team might do better with another. What do I recommend to management about what our team wants to adopt to move forward?