Say “agile” one more time

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

IMG_2937Everyone is agile nowadays. I think that even my cat knows this word. Our sales team is agile, our development teams are agile. We do daily stand-ups, why would you say we are not agile?

I am really very a bit tired because of all this hype.

Let me tell how it usually looks like when you are agile*. I mean “agile”. I know, I am mixing the issues of agile frameworks with the bad implementation issues. Please don’t blame me for that, as this is like real life – all possible mistakes are made and they are uniquely mixed.

*All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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The fun is dead, long live the fun!

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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Are you happy on Monday morning? What about Friday evening? We all know how office workers are waiting for the Friday evenings… Because work is hard. Because there is no more joy. Really? How people who are not feeling good about their work can produce something great?

If you ask any of your colleague when they felt joy at work they probably tell you about some challenge they faced and successfully solved or brainstorming, where their team produced a great idea. Also they can point out the time when they worked with a great passionate team of developers. Even if they were creating “one more social network”.

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PMs guide to tricky questions: What burndown can tell you?

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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Show me your burndown chart and I will tell you how the things are going. To be honest I am amazed how simple the things became for the project managers (does not depend whose hat PM is wearing now – scrum master, product owner) now – you need only a few metrics to be able to plan and forecast with the same success rate as it was previously. The burndown (I personally prefer burnup) chart is a very simple thing – easy to explain, easy to maintain. But it is a powerful instrument in the hands of the scrum master and the team.

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Variations of Lego Scrum simulation and lessons learned

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

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Almost 2 years ago I wrote about my experience with Lego Scrum simulation. Since that time I practised it about 10 times with different teams – inside and outside of my company. When you start playing it for the 2-3rd time you get a bit tired of building the city, so we changed the theme and the backlog every time) I also discovered, that this game helps teams not only to understand the Scrum better, but to uncover some conflicts existing in the teams. When I stopped trying to combine the roles of trainer and product owner and invited my gorgeous colleague Dmitry Velikoivanenko (thank you, thank you a lot for all you have done!) to join I was able to get more from the sessions, as I had time to observe the team’s behaviour.

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WTF Project Manager is doing in Scrum team?

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

IMG_6532Thousands of companies are changing to agile, thousands are already agile (they tell you so very confidently). Some of them implemented Scrum. But I still come across of a lot of Project Managers in such companies. Ok, even better – I have a title of “Senior PM” myself (I hope no one from my teams/colleagues will not see my business cards, as they don’t know I am a PM ^_^). When company implements scrum they have to make a hard decision – what to do with these PMs we have? And usually they have a lot of PMs. I have seen companies where there is 1 PM per each 2 developers. Usually they become Scrum Masters or Product Owners, as it seems the most natural way. Just change the title and that is all – you are the Scrum Master now. Sometimes PMs are left as they were – they still “manage” the projects.

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Zombie team management: team health check-list

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

IMG_5205I believe that Project manager is here, on this planet, not only for the projects to be delivered in time and on budget. On of the most important things for the Project managers is to care about their teams. In software development I always worked so close with the teams, that I couldn’t imagine I can avoid supporting teams health, mood and motivation.
So, let’s talk about monitoring your team health, so you can see the signs of the death coming or any feed back of the system on your actions. By the way, some Project managers prefer to work with zombie teams, as they are so easy to control. I am not judging, so you can use the check-list the both ways – to prevent your team becoming a zombie team and to make you team a zombie team.

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Ok…But who is resposible for delivery?

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

Decided to create this post as I’ve heard this question many times during the last 3 weeks. Several people asked that during the cspo training; clients asked 2 times; my boss and my colleagues could not omit this question too(3 times in total). So I want to share some of my thoughts on this topic.

Let’s imagine a scrum team, which is working on a Product. We have a Scrum master – a nice guy – and a Product owner, who has a lot of great ideas and drives the product on. The team works hard every sprint (yes, they play tennis and drink coffee several times a day. And… oh, hell… they even read facebook and watch cat videos during the working hours. So, just an average team). And one day their stakeholder/big boss comes and asks Scrum Master, “Ok, I see the team is working. You have a scrum master, a product owner… But we have a release planned in 2 months. So, tell me, who is responsible for the delivery? Who is responsible for the release being shipped on time?”

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Crappy code – keep your team happy

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

Several months ago I joined the new for me project team. They have been working on this product for more than a year. You know what it means for the mobile project – we have a tons of code created) So, one of the most severe issues guys mentioned is the crappy code – developers told me that during the first retrospective we had. My first reaction was – “So why do you create this crappy code?”. But the answer was very easy for them – “We inherited that code from the previous team, they created all this awful things!”.

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How we do retrospectives

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

It is time for my first post to be translated 🙂

No doubt retrospectives are one of the most important meeting in the development process. But teams usually tend to ignore them. If you don’t push them they just stop doing retrospectives at all, as this activity seems “useless” to them. But when else can we get such a magical push and start changing for the better, if not during retrospective? We can continue making the same mistakes over and over again.

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Supernatural PM

Posted on by tisquiiirrel

I want to share my thoughts on the main project manager/scrum master/leader responsibilities in the team. In the vacancies texts I usually come across the following PMs responsibilities: he should plan, estimate, manage risks, etc. But why our projects are still so often a disaster, nevertheless our PMs are planning, estimating, managing risks, etc and doing that thoroughly?

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