One of my fellow Certified Scrum Trainers, Henrik Kniberg, created this excellent video that describes agile software development from the point of view of the product owner. I’m really impressed, and I regularly share this with the participants in my Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner workshops. Great job Henrik!
A client recently contacted us for guidance regarding managing individual performance in a scrum environment. This is a growing company that successfully adopted scrum a few years back. They asked me what they should do with a scrum team member that is not performing. Should they implement a performance management system, and if so, how? Read the full article…
Hi Chris. It was great to have you in Beijing and you provided us with awesome Certified Scrum Master and Certified Scrum Product Owner trainings. We are having internal discussions about the role of quality engineers in scrum. Should they be on the scrum teams? Do we need quality engineers if we are doing scrum? If we have them, who should manage them? Should we move them around from team to team?
Should a scrum team include user experience design professionals or should they be separate from the the scrum team? I’m often asked this question by UX designers and managers when their organization adopts scrum. Here is an email I received recently.
My company is making a transition from waterfall to agile development using the guidelines from your book The Elements of Scrum. In your coaching of various companies, I was wondering if you’ve worked with teams that have user experience designers (UX) and where they’ve fit into the process. As a manager, I wanted to get your thoughts on whether it makes more sense for individuals with these skills to be part of a scrum team as a team member or work with the product owner as a stakeholder.
Thanks,
K
The short answer is, “It depends.” I’ve seen both approaches work: have the user experience people on the scrum team, or have the UX person be part of the product owner’s inner circle of advisors but not actually on the scrum team. Let’s look at each approach.
Read the full article…
A couple of years ago, Hillary Louise Johnson and I had nearly finished writing The Elements of Scrum and we were discovering that the options for publishing it through traditional means didn’t satisfy us. A traditional publishing deal wouldn’t give us the creative control we wanted, and the royalty terms offered by traditional publishers weren’t to our liking. The answer, Hillary saw, was to start a publishing company; Dymaxicon was born.
Hillary had big plans right from the start. “Because of my years spent as a journalist and author, I had a huge backlog of books I knew of that had never found a home with traditional publishers,” she says. “So I started making calls.”
Read the full article…
“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”
From The ‘Busy’ Trap by Tim Kreider (New York Times), the best essay I’ve read in a long time about the value of slack, down-time, etc. (Our own Steve Bockman has designed exercises to teach software teams and software managers that utilization–ie, “busy-ness”–does not equal productivity).
Why, just yesterday Chris and I spent part of our 4th holiday on a fool’s errand, running to Daly City to look at an unlocked cell phone he found on Craigslist. It was a beautiful day, and we rode surface streets, with the top down on the convertible. Along the way we started looking at crazy stuff on Craigslist, and having silly conversations. We almost bought a private island, and a sailboat, but in the process we stumbled on office space that may just become the new Agile Learning Labs world headquarters. All because we took the time to run a fool’s errand, slowly, on a gorgeous day. Today is another gorgeous day… so try it!
I recently received the following question about performance reviews from a human resources professional at an organization that is adopting agile development practices.
Question:
My organization is just starting to use Agile and the question regarding performance management and specifically how performance reviews were now going to be done for the employees came up. Everyone turned to the HR team for the answer so I’m doing some research on this.
It appears in the agile world, some coaches and practitioners will say “there should be no such thing as performance management” but I’m hoping people recognize this is a reality in the corporate world and needs to be addressed. Currently our performance management system is based on an annual cycle and individual performance reviews/assessments are completed by the managers for their direct reports.
Can you share with me how organizations are addressing performance management and specifically performance reviews/assessments for individual employees that are on agile teams?
Read the full article…
In Integrum, Chris talks to Roy van de Water and Drew LeSeur of Integrum about running Agile Learning Labs as a transparent company with a radical compensation plan, writing The Elements of Scrum using scrum, and how our new book, Scrum: A Breathtakingly Brief and Agile Introduction is an iteration of our first one.
Roy and Drew ask some excellent and hard questions, so tune in and give a listen!
Since this article was first published, The Team Estimation Game has evolved into something even better: Easy Estimation With Story Points. If you are looking for a fast and effective way to estimate, we recommend going straight to that article. If want to know where Easy Estimation With Story Points came from, keep reading.
The Team Estimation Game plays like a game, but it accomplishes valuable work: assigning story point estimates to user stories.
Teams using this technique are typically able to estimate 20 to 60 stories in an hour. The game was invented by our friend and colleague, Steve Bockman. Here is how one team plays the game:
Read the full article…
If you are at the 2012 Atlanta Scrum Gathering, you got a copy of The Elements of Scrum by Chris Sims and yours truly in your conference goody bag, as we are proud sponsors of this year’s event. If you’d like Chris to sign your copy, he’ll be doing so at 12:30 pm on Tuesday in the Heritage Room. And I promise: if you bring along three rubber chickens, he will juggle them!
What, you say you don’t yet have a copy of The Elements of Scrum and are consumed with envy? Easily solved! Take one of our CSM or CSPO classes and you’ll get one, or if you just can’t wait, buy yourself a copy here on Amazon. Makes a great Mother’s Day gift! Just kidding. That would be, like, the worst Mother’s Day gift of all time. If you need a Mother’s Day gift, buy her a copy of my mom Ricki Grady’s book, BeBop Garden instead.