Agile Business

Alot of people marketing themselves as CSMs are clearly not good enough, and have misunderstood the key concepts underlying Scrum... Some of the questions I see on groups from CSMs about the very fundamental basics of scrum are shocking. This is evidenced in the increasing reliance of people on tools for scrum. Additionally, there is an increasing "cost" of the "infrastructure" that is coming with scrum projects is pushing the scrum community further and further away from its core values. Scrum is about people thinking for themselves, in their specific environment, with the variables the team faces, collectively identifying potential options, experimenting with approaches, reviewing the results, inspecting and adapting... It seems to me that too many people using Scrum are asking for help from external people, rather than working with their team to progress a problem. Scrum Masters should be talking to the people around them, the stakeholders, the team members, the ...

What follows is a suggested approach to tackling impediments on the critical path within a scrum environment. In another life, I was in the Royal Navy serving at sea in an operational environment, and we used to "play" war games. During a war, the control of the ship shifts from the captain and the bridge to the Ops Officer and the Ops room. Various teams across the ship are working on understanding the threats to the ship and the opportunity to attack targets. The sonar team will have contacts that they are assessing, radar will be picking up contacts, communications intelligence will have information on aircraft chatter etc. The Ops team are assessing threats in real-time and the individual teams are all working on providing more information to the Ops Officer on when to launch weapons or countermeasures... "Missile away" "Launch, launch, launch, bearing 274 degrees" Upon a communications analyst hearing missile away on aircraft chatter, they scream that...

Hi, A couple of weeks ago a colleague of mine was having a terrible time at work, highly stressed, a mountain of work, and thinking she'd made a big mistake joining the company. We went for a Starbucks (thank the lord for making Starbucks) and a chat... The issues were a great big pile of work and many masters... Not uncommon I think. I just told her a few "tricks of the trade" that had been passed onto me, and now things have "turned around 100%". 1. The biggest source of stress at work is people . We're either communicating poorly, not empathising, not understanding the complexity of tasks, got hangovers etc, etc, etc.... Once you understand this, you can filter the noise and get on with the work. 2. Have a daily action plan... I don't care who you are or what you do, but spending 10 minutes at the beginning of the day thinking about and writing down what you'll achieve by the end of the day is a MUST! It helps maintain your motivation and focus, ...

I believe that adopting a scrum approach to project delivery provides the following benefits: Higher levels of business buy-in Higher levels business involvement Clearer alignment of functionality to business value Higher levels of adoption Better ROI Now... for clarity, I'd like to point out that I have created business cases before and hope I will continue to do so for agile projects. I've used ROI, with discounted cashflows, NPV and IRR and even the Benefits Management process designed by Cranfield Business School. But... often the traditional delivery approaches do not help the team to maintain a focus on the business case throughout the lifecycle of a project. Often once the requirements have been stated, the business moves into the "pay and pray" stage, where they hope that in about 6 months time they'll get what they asked for. Agile approaches have in-built processes that ensure a constant focus on business value. and now I'll tell you how... Scrum is ...