Just as agile teams strive to continuously improve, they should also continuously seek opportunities to reduce wasteful activities. A good start is creating visual representations of a team’s total wasted time over the course of several sprints as well as its time invested in improvements.
Working with iterations does not automatically make you an agile team. It doesn't even necessarily mean that you are using iterative development. Paradoxically, it is possible to be agile without use of iterations. Let’s get into details...
How can your team accurately predict and communicate meaningful delivery timelines when it is constantly fielding changes from the multiple business units it serves? Here is a detailed look at how one Scrum-centered team used a four-step approach to estimate timelines for work far into the future.
Scope creep can plague projects where timelines are established at the start, or budgets and resources are fixed. However, it should not be a problem for projects operating with agile principles. Rather than resisting change, an agile team welcomes it, and figures out how to adapt to it. Here's how.
The words “agile project management” are being used in the industry to describe a new approach to how project management is conducted. The industry and company leaders need to fully understand how project managers can be brought into the agile world to ensure cohesion between these two disciplines.
These days, it takes more than project management skills to succeed. It takes a person with agility—flexibility in understanding and applying the ins and outs of any method. Let’s investigate what "hybrid PM" is all about!
Kanban has been synonymous with Lean since its origins were from that movement, but we have also witnessed a spawn of new iterations. These are all testaments to its growing popularity and influence. This article will be the first in a multi-part series that will cover Kanban in terms of its origins and genealogy, current use in the software development and project management industry and the possible future trends of this very interesting workflow visualization tool.
We've already traced the genealogy of Kanban. It’s now time to start looking at the evolution of Kanban from its manufacturing roots in the automobile industry to its current widespread use in software development. This will ultimately allow us to see where practices and tools like Lean and Kanban go to the “beyond”.
In Scrum, a sprint is complete when its time-boxed duration is over, but what if the Product Owner hasn’t signed-off on all the user stories? Should a team get credit for partially completed stories? Can a sprint be extended if the team was “close”?
Agile practices are not intrinsically “value-adding” — they must be aligned to business needs and goals in order to provide true value. By measuring their agility based on compliance with a particular method, organizations may prevent their teams from adapting practices to suit projects with different characteristics and needs.
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