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
Singapore Airlines is one of the worlds most respected airlines. They keep winning airline awards. I happened to live in Singapore and therefore it is most easy for me to fly Singaporeair. And, I have to admit, it is one of the better airlines and I especially notice this when
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
This post relates to a post written by a friend George Dinwiddie related to the Satir Change Model. In the post he refers to a tweet I made related to the Satir Change Model. I'd like to add some clarification and argue that it is not "just
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
In the previous blog post, I gave a list of points when adopting agile in an organization. One of them was: * Start with one team but immediately make the organizational changes needed to support that one team. But what does that mean "the organizational changes needed to support that
I'm frequently asked whether I got tips for how to start an agile adoption. A lot of people are looking for the ten step magic recipe that will magically transform their organization to an agile organization. I tend to reply with the 'bad' news first: Every
Everyone knows it! Nokia is *not* doing well. The new Windows strategy is not popular with the (geeky) public or Nokia employees. Recently, a couple of blog posts and comments have been posted about Scrum, Nokia and "The Nokia Test". I don't want to criticize the
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 -
The last month, I've come across this issue several time, to my surprise (because it hasn't come up in the years before). If you are wrapping tests around legacy code and the legacy code has a C-style assert in the production code, then what do you
Review posted on amazon.com: I was looking forward to David Anderson's book. While I wasn't enthusiastic about his previous book: Agile Management, I liked his new work and the balanced view on change he is promoting. It all made me curious. I've not