In a recent Agile Marketing Meetup in Boston we tried to figure out how mature are the Agile Marketing teams/organizations out there. Last week I helped facilitate a third quarterly Agile planning event (also known as SAFe PI Planning or Big Room Planning) for a group of agile marketers I’ve been working with for the past year. This was a good opportunity to ask this question.
There is nothing like a good long run for clear thinking and giving rise to new ideas. This post is a result of my weekend run, and it’s about managers and why it is so hard to impact their mindset in the Agile journey.
The idea originated as a result of my experience working with this company where the managers find it extremely difficult to relate to the newly formed scrum teams and instead keep communicating with their original teams (Dev and QA teams) and at the same time keep complaining about how the “scrum teams” are not accountable for their end-to-end deliveries.
When we build a kanban board to manage our work (either practicing Kanban or Scrum) we usually create a Backlog list (usually the first column) and a To Do list (following the Backlog). I’ve noticed that many times the separation between the two is artificial and people don’t always understand the critical difference between the two. I’d like to discuss it here.
One of the significant changes while moving to Agile teams is that testers and developers are now part of the same team.
This change introduces great advantages, as well as some challenges.
The immediate impact is that the testers participate in the Scrum ceremonies and get a better exposure to the product under development, its status, and its fragility. They can therefore detect better potential areas for defect finding, gain better sync for when they’ll get a drop for testing, and can better utilize their plans.
A good way to improve how a team works together is to try to run experiments for collaboration. We’ve listed here a set of experiments you may want to try, depending on where your team is in the journey for better teamwork. Each section has a description, a goal for improvement and then the set of experiments that may help achieving the goal.
It is so great to have some slack time, as you can let your mind get off a bit from your own coaching activities and learn from others. It is also great as sooner or later you will connect the dots back to implement those insights and even write a post on it 🙂
At AgileSparks we allocate some of this slack for a Gemba walk. Today, for example, I was lucky to join my colleague in a kickoff meeting of a distributed PO forum. Leading a remote session is a challenging situation by itself, as well as working with a wide range of audiences or with distributed coaches. But let’s tackle them one by one. I promise that at the end you will also get the how to run your first distributed PO forum tips as well.
Reinersten’s Book The Principles of Product Development Flow) that when you avoid overutilization (that is, use less than 100% capacity) a system (like a road or a scrum team) that handles items with variation (like cars or stories for software) you get better cycle time – that is, items flow faster through the system.
Don Reinerstern in his book “The Principles of Product Development Flow” writes about the importance of having an economic view when making decisions. This is because we are usually developing products to improve our financial standing (and even if it is not for “making money” but rather for nobler reasons, still there is the economic view).
These days, it seems that scaling Agile is all the rage. But while Agile might be the most efficient way to get a product to
Continuous deployment is a process that encourages developers to push new code to production whenever they can. In this presentation, Itai will explain the principles of continuous deployment and will show how Outbrain can deploy code more than 20 times a day while serving recommendations to top publishers (including USA Today, iVillage, Boston.com, Chicago Tribune, Newsweek, TheStreet, The Boston Globe, and Slate. Hebrew: Ynet, Haaretz, TheMarker, Globes, City mouse, JPost and more).
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