Link Roundup #5

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Handling Meetings with Remote Attendees

This is the third session in my brown bag series. It's not an "agile" topic really, but it was one of the things people requested a session on.  I hoped that people would bring their questions and be willing to discuss them. There were four topics proposed, and some conversation although it was mostly people in the room. Here is the outline:  Day before, set up a Trello board as an option for people to raise topics and added a link to the invitation. Recruited a co-pilot who would watch the WebEx chat and bring up anything that came in through that.  Five minutes before the session, dial in to WebEx, start camera, ensure that screen sharing is set up and the projector is working.  Noon - official start time. 
Read more

"Borrowing" People

So here is a new thing for this blog, and maybe I can turn it into a series, who knows. As I've said many times, I feel strongly that getting your Scrum Master certificate is less an achievement in itself than an announcement that you have begun your apprenticeship. Now that I've been doing the job for a year, while I obviously have a lifetime of learning ahead, I can no longer consider myself a raw newbie. This seems like a good time, then, to start being more conscious about what I've learned so far. The topic of this post is something that I intuited early on was a terrible idea, and while I did object then, it wasn't very strongly. I should have pitched a much bigger fit than I did as a brand-new, part-time Scrum Master.  Team Alpha has five members. Three of them have what I shall describe as high borrow-value. This  is to say that they have expertise that places them in high demand for projects outside their nominal department. Note that they are in high deman...
Read more

Agile Transitions as Self-Sustaining Reaction

Weird confession time? I used to be a little dubious about the long-term role of coaches and even of Scrum Masters or equivalent in an Agile organization. Once you’ve taught people the rules, what else is there to do? People are smart, and Agile methods as a rule aren’t complicated. I wondered—how could it possibly take more than a year or so to get this thing going? Then I spent several years observing an Agile transition from its initial push phase through to a kind of equilibrium, and I have gained a different understanding of the roles and the process in such a transition. I’m going to call these roles Primary Agile, because their work centers on fostering agility— and nothing else . Agile transitions can be thought of as something like a chemical reaction. The system starts in one state, and by adding some ingredients and – most importantly – energy, the system changes into a different state. For most organizations, that end state is going to be very different from whe...
Read more