During Agile adoption and transformation, there's an important question of "what change do you introduce next". Approaches I see a few approaches to introduce the next change. * Adopt Scrum, which means to introduce Scrum roles - cross-functional team, PO and SM; Scrum events - planning, daily
Recently, i attended a training on Kanban. To drive continuous improvement, Kanban has its main or even sole focus on shortening the lead time. I was impressed by results from a couple of case studies shared in the training. This triggered me to think further on how improvement is achieved
Recently, I attended a workshop by David Hussman, and story mapping was one of the topics. Since I had rarely used story mapping, while didn't realize its Indispensability, it made me think of why. * Why story mapping? The introduction of story mapping technique is a response to lack
PSPI (Potentially Shippable Product Increment) is an important concept in Scrum framework. At the end of sprint, team is supposed to deliver a potentially shippable product increment. The focus of PSPI is on the readiness of the delivery. MVP (Minimum Viable Product) is a term popularized in lean startup. It&
Self-organizing team is an essential element in Scrum. ScrumMaster has the responsibility to help team become self-organizing. Agile coaches often give the suggestion that you should take the problem to team. While this is a good suggestion, it is too much simplified thus not used effectively in practice. I'
I worked with an organization that adopted Scrum for months. Their traditional release milestone for "content frozen" still kept, and I found that they had assigned all features to teams in sprints on that milestone. I asked, "wouldn't it be change on requirements while you
It is a well-known but still common mistake that many organizations during their Scrum transformation try to map their existing roles such as project managers into Scrum Master role. Recently, i notice that same happens to PO role as well. Not realizing that PO is a new role is as
Recently, while i coach a product development organization on Scrum, i notice that they have made all former team leaders as ScrumMasters. Though this arrangement itself may not be a problem, the reason behind that decision certainly concerns me. ScrumMaster has challenge on leading the team, because team does not
Recently, my former NSN colleague, Huang Hongqiang, and me reflected on the lessons learnt from Product Owner perspective during our Agile transformation. We used to work together for one product area with 100+ people, 10+ teams for more than 3 years. He has been the Area Product Owner, who provides
I recently attended a sprint review. It went on like this. PO checked every acceptance criteria in details, and criticized as much as he could; while team defended and demanded for acceptance, as much as they could. I heard comments as below. * From team, "we will only work on
I have been implementing, and suggesting others to implement, solid team in Scrum context. I consider this as essential because virtual team structure so often leads to unaligned purpose and goals, since the respective managers still try to enforce their (e.g. functional) goals on the members who now work
Product Owner is responsible for the product success. Product Owner is the single interface about team's work. In a single-team environment, PO works with that team constantly. It's all very clear. However, in a multiple-team environment, it gets more complicated. It gets problematic to have one
Project management is done differently in Scrum Project management work still exists when adopting Scrum. Traditionally, project manager plays key role for project management work, and it is done in a centralized manner. While in Scrum, project management work is done in a distributed manner, split among Scrum roles -
Definition of Done is the agreement between Product Owner and team. As ultimate goal, team is delivering potentially shippable product increment every sprint, thus, your Definition of Done shall be equal to what's required to make your product increment potentially shippable. However, your current Done may be only
In Scrum, there are release commitment and sprint commitment. Though we use the word of commitment all the time, it is often not clear what it means. Let's first look at the commitment we make towards customers. This happens at release level. In some situation, we need to