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Agile

Guidelines for Common sense ☺

Recently in retrospectives of one of the scrum teams, one team member had some strong opinions about guidelines that were defined for code reviews. Besides what to review and how to review, the guidelines also had some instructions on who should review which features/stories’ code. He strongly felt that the reviewers for his stories didn’t add much value, the code reviews waited longer for feedback, and the reviewer didn’t seem to have much context, so didn’t add much value. He felt that his design reviewers or his colleagues working on the same story should have been the peer reviewers!

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Agile

COVID-19 and Agile

A fresh perspective on uncertainty, complexity, empiricism, and flow and what to do about it.
The COVID-19 pandemic gives us plenty of opportunities to think about uncertainty, and complexity, and how to deal with those using Empiricism.

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Scaled Agile Framework

Improving SAFe thru Professional Scrum

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.

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Agile

Risk-aware Product Development (a.k.a. Agile)

“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”

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Agile

The Product Manager / Product Owner AS A Scientist

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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Agile

SAFe is a Scaled Agile Framework, Not a Scaled Agile Methodology

when it comes to how to practice SAFe as well as how to implement it, we prefer to consider it a very useful but flexible/incomplete structure that requires well-trained and experienced practitioners to successfully apply, and that’s a key design principle for our Implementing SAFe workshops where we train future SPCs

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Agile Marketing

SAFe for Agile Marketing Guidance Article

Scaling Agile Marketing With SAFe – Overview

More and more Marketing organizations are realizing today that they need to be faster, more flexible/responsive, and more collaborative, in order to have a real impact on the business they’re supporting. More and more CMOs are looking at Agile Marketing as the way to modernize their organization.

Inspired by Agile Development, Agile Marketing describes a mindset of continuous learning and validation, customer-focused collaboration across functional silos, adaptive and iterative campaigns, and more responsive/continuous planning. Similar to development organizations, Agile Marketing teams use techniques such as Scrum to work in an iterative cadence, and such as Kanban to visualize and improve the flow of work.

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Feature teams

Team Storming and Compost

A team I am working with is in the storming stage of its development.

Finally.

It’s been some time that they have been forming, carefully learning each other, sometimes from afar. Each person was doing their own stuff, limiting their interaction to consultations. Every person to their own.

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Insights

Getting Real About Your Values – The Values Retrospective

Bringing values down to earth
Values and principles can often seem lofty and intangible so many agile practitioners prefer to focus on tools and practices. That’s understandable but unfortunate. Because values and principles have the potential to provide us with clarity and guidance that transcends what practices and frameworks can achieve. Ideally – part of your empiric inspection and adaptation process should explore whether you are living according to your values/principles. To achieve that you can try a value-based retrospective.

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