Blog Series: A Decade in Agile

-

10 years…
Ten whole years of my working life dedicated to creating software through agile methods. A lot of things have changed since those first few sprints. Lots of lessons learned, (usually the hard way), plenty of experience from working with lots of different people, with difference perspectives, in different locations, with diverse cultures and in unique companies.
As I went through the highs and lows of agile adoption I wrote a small but detailed blog along the way. These ‘epistles’ were usually written when I had considerable motivation to tell the story – when on a high from success, or a low from learning things the hard way. These blogs became a vehicle to vent frustration or expound virtues of some new insight or shift in mind-set.
Over these first weeks of 2013, I’m going to take some time to review these blogs, and retrospectively comment, amend and critique the thinking at the time, against the years of experience that have followed. Maybe I’ll learn something new along the way and I hope you’ll enjoy the journey too. There are 2 main categories of blogs I’ll be reviewing:

Category 1: The Basics & Tactics


These blogs are more for the people in the trenches actually using Scrum in anger (or bliss!) and consists of lessons, insights and patterns that have proven useful.
·      Breaking the Iron Triangle: Project Manager v Scrum Master
·         How Adopting Agile Increases Business Benefits
·         The 10 Commandments of Agile Planning
·         Which Agile Method?
·         Launch, launch, launch
·         Agile Metrics & Scorecards
·         Constraining Agility
·         The Machine that Changed the World
·         A Nod to a Solid Team

Category 2: Transformational & Strategic


These blogs are aimed at the executive or change management audience emphasising key concepts, mind-sets and expectations when leading agile change initiatives:
·         CIO/IT Director – What Agile Means to You
·         Implementing Agile: Top-down or Bottom-up
·         Inversion Management: 21st Century Leadership
·         Agile & Transformational Leadership
·         Lost in Translation
·         Organisational Patterns
·         Fearless Change
·         Emotional Intelligence
·         The Cellular Business Model

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lost in Translation

-
Enterprise Scrum - Tactics for Implementing Agile Practices If you are implementing agile practices, methodologies and organisational changes within the company without full executive support, you are probably facing an uphill struggle. I was watching a TV documentary on the space race the other day, and one of the interviewees stated that in today's world nobody takes any real risk... This is fundamentally the problem you face, agile is perceived as high risk and difficult to manage. From a traditional management perspective, it is! Agile is about recognising there is a limit to control, that all things are not predictable, and that although we have clear objectives and a general direction, the detail of functionality and architecture is unknown at the beginning of a project. Managers need to learn an empirical approach to work and ensure that feedback loops and frequent communication are embedded within the fabric of the organisation. So with so much risk... cost, direction, cont
Read more

Breaking the Iron Triangle: Project Manager v Scrum Master

-
Image
As a PM my general approach to initiating projects has been to build a Project Initiation Document (PID – Prince). A PID details the project objectives, initial scope, organisational structure, roles & responsibilities, deliverables, project processes (lines of communications, risk management, issue management, change control), plans, costs and timelines. And starting an agile project I would still identify most of the above and ensure it is clearly communicated to all stakeholders. But… I have learnt that adopting a scrum approach changes two fundamental things for a project manager: · The Iron Triangle · The Role of Project Manager The iron triangle of cost, time and scope (or quality) is typically the responsibility of the project manager to manage. Hopefully tolerance levels have been set for each element of the triangle, and if the tolerance level is about to be breached or is broken, the project manager escalates their issues to the project board or steering group. Previously
Read more

Starting Out

-
I left Conchango and started in my new role at the beginning of March this year. I'd been working as Scrum Master ( www.controlchaos.com ) with the likes of Howard van Rooijen ( http://blogs.conchango.com/howardvanrooijen/default.aspx ) and Ian Shimmings ( http://blogs.conchango.com/ianshimmings/default.aspx ), and fundamentally wanted to take agile practices to an organisational level. Moving a development team of 25 from traditional methods to agile practices is an exercise in change management. But even the word change management implies a clear direction, manipulation or cohersion and "management" of the process. I knew straight away that in order to encourage adoption of agile practices I would need to capture hearts and minds rather than direct a change programme. My previous blogs discuss transformational leadership and emotional intelligence, and I recognised that this is how I want to lead development. Even writing (I want to lead development) seems to go against
Read more