The Scrum Master’s role has become one of the most important and challenging roles in modern organizations since they act as the main interface between top management and the teams that actually produce and deliver the company’s value to the customer.
Recently, I had the opportunity to work on legacy code with several teams from various organizations. I would like to share my experience.
We usually start by choosing a piece of code that is “painful”: changing frequently and “scary” to touch because of its complexity. We explain that our purpose is to make the code simpler, readable, and easy to change. Establishing the motivation for what we do is important!
Seriously, please don’t come.
Don’t come if you’re looking at it as a formality since you already know everything about agile and just need the SPC (SAFe Program Consultant) Certificate.
Don’t come if you’re looking for the cheapest way to get your SPC so that you can add it to your resume.
Don’t come if you don’t know anything about agile and believe the SPC is your silver bullet to becoming an agile coach at the enterprise level.
Don’t come if you’re looking for the certificate rubber stamp.
Marketing Backlogs in the Trenches
Last week I facilitated a 2-day Agile Marketing workshop for one of my clients. As usual, the discussion about the Marketing Backlog and how to move from a big-bang marketing campaign to a more iterative approach via smaller slices of stories was one of the highlights.
As usual, I introduce the concept of User Stories which are the most popular way to represent Product Backlog Items (PBIs) in the Agile world and are also very popular in the Agile Marketing space. We looked at some awful examples of stories, such as “As a marketer, I want to install Drift on my site” or “As a user, I want to see a webinar” and then moved to stories that provide more insights about a real user (e.g. “As a VP Marketing focused on Demand Generation”) and their intent (e.g. “so that I could get more demand generated from people who hate forms and lead magnet registration-walls”)
We then broke out into multiple teams each taking an actual campaign/project they’re planning for 2019 and creating the Marketing Backlog for it.
What is the connection between Uncertainty and the Scaled Agile Framework?
Uncertainty is one of the core reasons we need to be agile. Different modes of Business/Requirements/Technology uncertainties impact our economic costs in product development – especially the potential impact of risk. The first principle of SAFe™ is “Take an economic view”. I frequently use my “uncertainty filter glasses” to take an alternative economic view. I find it helps Scaled Agile/SAFe™ practitioners/leaders understand both the need for Agility as well as examine various work system design considerations. In this article, I introduce the Stacey Matrix which is one of my favorite models for understanding the uncertainty landscape as well as the implications of uncertainty on various specific SAFe™ design decisions.
To Team or not to Team?
If you look at the definition of Kanban or Lean, you wouldn’t find teams anywhere there.
If you look at the Agile Manifesto, you can find “The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams”
Scrum is quite clear about the topic
SAFe includes Scrum – so how come many Scrum practitioners and thought leaders consider it unsafe?
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe™) is one of the most popular approaches to applying agile at scale out there. SAFe’s perspective is that “Nothing beats an Agile Team” and it doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel or even innovate too much when it comes to the Team level. It takes advantage of established frameworks and techniques that work well – Scrum being the first and foremost of those.
“There’s no predictability/commitment in Agile”
Over the years I’ve heard my share of these kinds of statements from various levels of executives:
“When my guys run a product development release I really want to know what I will get at the end so I can make business plans accordingly”
Keynotes Agile Israel 2018 Impact mapping with innovation games By Gojko Adzic @ Gojko.net More Talks Agile Israel 2018 ATT Israel Journey to Built In
We’ve all heard it before – “Talented technology team builds amazing product!” That… doesn’t create the impact that they wanted, not enough customers end up buying or the users aren’t happy with it or
This is an especially common problem with companies that have a “brilliant” idea or technology that someone goes developing in their garage (if startup) / innovation product development group (if enterprise). This could be a new product or just a new feature of an existing product. Typically, the Product Owner or Product Manager in the organization specifies what to build. If they’re somewhat Agile, they even work closely with the organization to build it incrementally and hopefully deliver it continuously. But still, even then, too often the product or features don’t provide the expected impact/benefits. Overcoming this challenge is a common theme that is discussed by attendees at our SAFe POPM Course.
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