Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community
QCon London 2010!
March 10-12, 100
Speakers, 80 sessions,
"THE" team leads and,
architects conference.
Free Book Offer
SOA Demystified
$40 Value
Scaling Scrum
in the enterprise?
ScrumWorks Pro
can help.
Start a trial today
Self-managed teams are unstable and are successful when the ‘Leadership – Self-Management’ dilemma is understood and dealt with. Too much central control destroys agility, inhibits creativity and resists change. Too much self-management leads to chaos and anarchy and destroys a team. A successful Agile Team operates as far along self-management as it can, without tipping over into chaos.
We often hear stories about daily standups that have become nothing more than long daily status meetings where team members tune out. What techniques do people have for avoiding this and other standup pitfalls?
Traditional management models don't tell leaders how to support their Agile teams without undermining their emerging self-organisation. Allusions to musical performance and "conducting the orchestra" abound - but not all are in agreement. Is the "conductor" model a good practice or an anti-pattern? In his TED talk, conductor Itay Talman shows that it may depend on what we think a conductor does.
One of the responsibilities of self-organizing teams is to take decisions that respect everyone’s opinion. This book has some great examples in coaching the team to navigate through difficult discussions so they can maintain their speed without endangering their success by suspending or ignoring critical issues.
Feature teams, common enough in small groups, are all too rare in large product development - but they can be a key to scaling with agility. This article analyses how feature teams resolve weaknesses of component teams, and points out key issues to address when transitioning. It is an excerpt from "Scaling Lean and Agile Development," by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde, to be published later this year.
Self-organization is a tricky thing. Agile coaches are challenged with how to motivate/persuade/trick their teams into self-organizing and doing things, without telling them what to do. This tutorial presents an approach utilizing leading-edge research and techniques from social complexity science and team dynamics to change the dynamics of a team with the aim of optimizing their work together.
In this presentation filmed during Agile 2007, Mike Cohn talks about the transitioning process towards an agile organization, why the process is inherently difficult, and what it takes to see self-organization emerging in a previously tightly controlled environment.
Scrum creator Jeff Sutherland guesses there are 120,000 Scrum teams holding standup meetings on any given working day. But how many are really doing Scrum? At QCon London 2007 he talked about "the Nokia test" which he likes to use to distinguish whether teams are doing Agile or only iterative process - or neither! He also revealed the connection between Scrum and the Mars robots.
David Hussmann "Agile Geek at Large" spoke with InfoQ about his approach to coaching teams adopting Agile, including how to customize it for different kinds of organizations, and some common factors to retain, to achieve lasting success.
Scrum, arguably the fastest-growing Agile methodology, is well described in the original Scrum books, which tend to be read once and put aside. The SPRiNT-iT coaches have abstracted the basics to produce a compact reference to help teams facilitate all Scrum meetings and create the Scrum artifacts. The book doesn't teach Scrum, but offers trained teams confidence to run their first successful Sprints - successes that will increase the acceptance of Scrum in their organization.
