As an experienced agile coach, this writer often gets asked about agile tactics and practices--what works and what doesn’t. There are no singular answers, but there are some generative behaviors and rules for agile done well. In this article, he explores a set of common anti-patterns that he sees in an effort to share what not to do in your agile journey.
Troubleshooting geographically distributed agile teams is difficult--made even more difficult because you can’t see the people you need to talk to. Don’t assume it’s the first problem you consider.
The different roles of Scrum Masters, coaches, trainers, consultants and, yes, project managers are often confusing to organizations transforming from traditional to Agile practices. Let’s take a closer look at these titles and how their responsibilities compare to one another in an emerging agile environment.
It’s daunting to define sprint durations and size stories when a scrum team is new and requirements are evolving. On top of that, it requires more mentoring when the agile practices and mechanics are in the nascent stages and you need to align all of the stakeholders to a common goal. Here is some help.
Some managers believe a bit of fear can be healthy, but Deming didn’t think so, and it can hurt projects in countless ways, from data manipulation to lack of innovation. On the other end of the spectrum, light agile approaches honor another Deming principle: focus on stakeholder value.
The benefits of outsourcing also come with various challenges—often because the vendor will execute the work with a project mindset that has limited visibility and never really looks at it from the product mindset. Agile can help instill the right outlook.
Testing at the end of a development cycle is a common practice in traditional approaches. Unfortunately, it becomes an obstacle on your path to agility, slowing down your ability to deploy to production faster. Let’s take a look at what goes on in this testing phase, some potential causes and ideas for getting unstuck.
Agile and Design Thinking, two leading trends in project management, follow an iterative approach and emphasize the importance of the team. But it is their differences that offer great potential when combined as complementary tools for complex problem-solving, customer interaction and value delivery.
What happens when you are not part of an agile development team? If you aren’t exercising your planning rituals and weekly sprints, will you lose muscle memory? Or is there an opportunity to apply what you know to better all aspects of what you do?
Creating a test sprint or varying the length of a sprint might seem like helpful ideas to address common problems on agile projects, but they should be avoided at all costs. These anti-patterns won’t fix the real underlying issues; in fact, they will probably exacerbate them and weaken your team.
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"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." - Pablo Picasso |
