No worries @SDAddick. I absolutely agree with you. I was trying to make the point through that story that some organisations are placing too much emphasis on 'thinking' Agile when in its simplest form it's just a technology delivery methodology that engages the business throughout the project lifecycle.
Far too many corporates that I've worked with are using Agile as some sort of buzz word to feel like they're future proofing themselves against disrupters. The reality is however (and has already been pointed out on here) that the majority of these organisations are too bureaucratic and risk averse to ever truly adopt it as intended.
No worries @SDAddick. I absolutely agree with you. I was trying to make the point through that story that some organisations are placing too much emphasis on 'thinking' Agile when in its simplest form it's just a technology delivery methodology that engages the business throughout the project lifecycle.
Far too many corporates that I've worked with are using Agile as some sort of buzz word to feel like they're future proofing themselves against disrupters. The reality is however (and has already been pointed out on here) that the majority of these organisations are too bureaucratic and risk averse to ever truly adopt it as intended.
100% agree. Around three years ago I was working at a company that started to go toward the "Agile workspace" thing. Take away a hive set-up, create open collaborative spaces, etc. It was all entirely superficial because at the end of the day it was an organization a couple years removed from really staunch hierarchical structure, we'd been bought up by a large health insurance company, and what was being worked on was incredibly boring and sometimes there was nothing to work on. I've since heard that after a year+ of the superficial changes they started to have a more genuinely Agile set-up, but at the end of the day, when you're a $10m entity in a multi-billion dollar organization you cannot and will not have the "self-empowered team" aspect that is so crucial in Agile unless you're treated as some sort of technology R&D area (which I pitched for months before leaving).
Agree, the self-empowered team is so crucial - and as is always the case, there are people (notice i didnt use resource) who refuse to 'go' Agile, my view is that if they continue to refuse to be part of the 'team' then ...bye,see you later...i'll find someone who does.
Those examples are precisely what I was hinting at when I suggested that some corporate environments seem to struggle because beurocracy (and layers of it at that) is so ingrained in their ethos. Often these places have the attitude of different specialties/jobs being their own silos, and that goes against the entire concept of Agile IMO. These issues seem to grow exponentially when multiple offices are involved too.
You can't pretend to embrace Agile when there are still duties that involve making requests to other teams/offices which will potentially take a few days. Examples like these have been pretty common in one place I worked at:
- Business Analyst Barry has a chat with the Developers and decides that feature x should work a different way, alas he needs to seek approval through several layers which will take 3 days.. blocking the development team.
- System Administrator Simon needs to acquire a new virtual server to deploy a testing instance of a new product, alas he needs to liaise with another office and get approval from finance... blocking the QA team who can't test the new product until these requests are approved and actioned.
You can throw in all the buzzwords, have as many meetings for planning/retrospective/feedback purposes and create as many self-governing teams as you like - but if the real blockers and speedbumps are further up the hierarchy, or ingrained in the company via historic attitudes, then it's utterly pointless.
Isnt that where the CSM kicks in ?, and attempts to clear 'blockers' and impediments ? - if he has the authorisation of the IT manager to do so, then these layers shouldnt be able to put blockers in the way of development. However,also, looking at it from a Dev team point of view, you should be bringing stories into the Sprint that you can achieve whilst waiting for the CSM to do his stuff and clear the impediments.
Agile shouldn't be used to usurp good governance though. It's not a free for all. A key to successful Agile is empowerment, particularly of the customer, but if changes need approval they need approval. That doesn't mean you can't be Agile, it just means that maybe more discipline is needed at that organisation.
Isnt that where the CSM kicks in ?, and attempts to clear 'blockers' and impediments ? - if he has the authorisation of the IT manager to do so, then these layers shouldnt be able to put blockers in the way of development. However,also, looking at it from a Dev team point of view, you should be bringing stories into the Sprint that you can achieve whilst waiting for the CSM to do his stuff and clear the impediments.
That suggests you have a competent CSM, or at the very least, someone who is adequate at attempting to be one!
If I regularly go into places and see companies doing 25/30 minute daily scrum/standup meetings (Remember, "The Scrum Guide" says these should be a "15-minute time-boxed event") where they discuss all manner of banalities, then this tells you quite a lot about how many of the "adopters" actually adhere to the principles. It's rare to find the usual efficient "Yesterday I did X, today I'm doing Y, and I have no blockers"; and something as small and trivial as scrum/standup meetings should be incredibly difficult to get wrong!
This is one reason that I genuinely think you'll find quite a bit of success with doing consultancy work focusing on Agile practices, because even purely from a development point of view - I can safely say that many businesses struggle. I think if I spent more time talking outside of the development circle (CTOs down to developers) and spoke to more product-centric roles (BAs etc) then I'd see even more issues.
With regards to your point, you underline a key issue there: the CSM requires proper authorisation from the relevant people - i.e the IT Manager. In places where the structure means liaising with people in different offices, with different priorities and so on - it can quickly make organisational issues more apparent. It's just an example of what happens when the organisation claims to adopt something, Agile in this case, but merely use it as another layer over the top of their existing structure/procedures.
- Business Analyst Dazzler has a chat with the Developers and decides that feature x should work a different way, alas he needs to seek approval through several layers which will take 3 days.. blocking the development team.
- Business Analyst Dazzler has a chat with the Developers and decides that feature x should work a different way, alas he needs to seek approval through several layers which will take 3 days.. blocking the development team.
My daily struggles!
Then surely the Developers work on another User Story that they would have deemed achievable within the same Sprint ?
- Business Analyst Dazzler has a chat with the Developers and decides that feature x should work a different way, alas he needs to seek approval through several layers which will take 3 days.. blocking the development team.
My daily struggles!
Then surely the Developers work on another User Story that they would have deemed achievable within the same Sprint ?
Oh they do, just not in ''Sprints'' as such.
Our devs want to use agile methodology, our BA's want to also, however our PM's and SMT for some reason won't to change how we do things.
As has been said unless those above us allow the changes, it won't work. (It's a fairly old company with a small mindset, despite being a sector leader)
Thats one of the major issues that i see, in that a lot of companies want to adopt Agile but are not prepared to go the whole hog and adopt full Agile methodology - and often fall into what some Agilists call 'Scrumban' - being a mix of Scrum methodologies and Kanban swimlanes. At the company i work at, we are attempting to embrace Agile - however this seems to have fallen on deaf ears with 2 of the 4 Scrum teams which has led to one team adopting a Scrumban approach, where they just move the goalposts re DoD or QA or even what is brought into the Sprint via the Planning meeting - one of the guys i regularly speak to tells me most of his work doesnt even have a JIRA ticket to associate points to - madness.
So we have subject matter experts, which in agile I'd guess would be a Product Owner? However I'm reading about them and they seem more like a BA than a SME.
Help! Can anyone give me a better clearer definition.
I'm thinking it would be nice to have a little seperate group (does Google do groups? Maybe just a Slack Chat) on Agile. I personally am in one of the ore difficult Agile settings I've ever been in where I have a team of 12-15 and a "Project Lead" who isn't technically the project lead but has been a retired Navy Captain for two months and all he's done for the last I don't know how many years is tell people what to do and he is killing our Agile. I'd just like to bitch to be honest .
Any suggestions on a more immediate collaboration tool? I'm fine keeping it here too, I'm just rubbish because there are about 15 things I want to reply to that I've missed.
Slack is always a good shout, it seems to be common enough that I'll guess most of us have it open half the time anyway? Throw open an agile room, and whack a link in to the forum with a general room for anyone that's interested in random nonsense. As long as AFKA doesn't mind?
Slack is always a good shout, it seems to be common enough that I'll guess most of us have it open half the time anyway? Throw open an agile room, and whack a link in to the forum with a general room for anyone that's interested in random nonsense. As long as AFKA doesn't mind?
Good idea guys. Keep hearing about Slack without knowing much about it tbh, and would be good to chat amongst like-minded people and learn. My current contract finishes soon, and looking to move into Agile full-time, so any knowledge gained will be very useful;
SD, is this not a time for escalating upwards, suggesting that there is potential for Dev Team disharmony and disfunction? After all, it is all about being a self-organising functioning team. Dazz, i've just come off a 2-day 'how to write effective user stories' course, so, fire away with the questions. Anyone using/used TDD? - must admit, cant get my head around Given,When,Then ! Anyone got any ways that i can think of them differently?
Slack is always a good shout, it seems to be common enough that I'll guess most of us have it open half the time anyway? Throw open an agile room, and whack a link in to the forum with a general room for anyone that's interested in random nonsense. As long as AFKA doesn't mind?
Good idea guys. Keep hearing about Slack without knowing much about it tbh, and would be good to chat amongst like-minded people and learn. My current contract finishes soon, and looking to move into Agile full-time, so any knowledge gained will be very useful;
SD, is this not a time for escalating upwards, suggesting that there is potential for Dev Team disharmony and disfunction? After all, it is all about being a self-organising functioning team. Dazz, i've just come off a 2-day 'how to write effective user stories' course, so, fire away with the questions. Anyone using/used TDD? - must admit, cant get my head around Given,When,Then ! Anyone got any ways that i can think of them differently?
It is, a great shout. I'm working on that but the problem is I work for a research institute arm of a university, and the hierarchy is just all over the place. My boss and the guys I'm friends with (who brought me in) don't have any relationship to this project formally, so..yeah.
I had our project lead tell me yesterday he didn't care about self-empowered teams or Agile, for that matter. So I'm going to try talking to him again Monday and explaining why it's so important. It's a very stressful time and he has no software experience. It's kind of the opposite of everything you'd want, and it's a good reminder why I swore I'd never be a Scrum Master or Agile Consultant again.
Slack is always a good shout, it seems to be common enough that I'll guess most of us have it open half the time anyway? Throw open an agile room, and whack a link in to the forum with a general room for anyone that's interested in random nonsense. As long as AFKA doesn't mind?
@AFKABartram do you have any problems having us link to a chatroom on the message board?
LR, I use it for other stuff so yeah I either have it open or messages eventually come through on my phone. I can try setting up a channel if there are no objections.
Slack is always a good shout, it seems to be common enough that I'll guess most of us have it open half the time anyway? Throw open an agile room, and whack a link in to the forum with a general room for anyone that's interested in random nonsense. As long as AFKA doesn't mind?
Good idea guys. Keep hearing about Slack without knowing much about it tbh, and would be good to chat amongst like-minded people and learn. My current contract finishes soon, and looking to move into Agile full-time, so any knowledge gained will be very useful;
SD, is this not a time for escalating upwards, suggesting that there is potential for Dev Team disharmony and disfunction? After all, it is all about being a self-organising functioning team. Dazz, i've just come off a 2-day 'how to write effective user stories' course, so, fire away with the questions. Anyone using/used TDD? - must admit, cant get my head around Given,When,Then ! Anyone got any ways that i can think of them differently?
Slack is awesome, mate. It's essentially your basic chat room - but also has a ton of integrations. One of my tasks at the moment is to try and get different teams in the current office to communicate more effectively, I'm thinking Slack may be the way to go there. There's also a third party company that we're overseeing, so I may make the most of some of the Slack integrations to gain a bit of visibility on what they're doing and when they're doing it. (They've proven themselves to be quite dishonest this week.) If you use JIRA then you may have used Atlassian's HipChat before? It's a bit similar.
There's also some very good Slack channels you can sign up for, I have one for TechLondon and one for freelancers/contractors. Can be a good boost if you're ever procrastinating/inbetween work, and need some work related conversation to switch you on.
Cheers Lucky - use JIRA, but not HipChat - will check it out.
To be fair, you're not missing out much on HipChat. I seem to recall it was incredibly expensive, and pretty buggy too. Atlassian seem to pour most of their money in to JIRA, and neglect their other services (Bitbucket and HipChat at least).
Because you were charged on the number of users you had (1-10 users = $10, 11-25 users = erh... $1,800!?) it was quite common to re-use accounts. This led to a scary bug whereby if you deleted a user, and then created a new one, it would get the last deleted users chat history. This made for some brilliant times when a new starter would log in and get the chat history of a bitter ex-employee who spent their notice period simply slagging people off via private messages..
Here is http://techlondon.io/ - I'll try and dig the other one from my inbox, if not I'll look on my laptop for the details. I don't participate too often as I'm not too bothered about startup/creative stuff, but some of the conversations are very interesting, and often people suggest things that are worth thinking about; i.e workflow ideas, productivity tools etc.
Comments
Far too many corporates that I've worked with are using Agile as some sort of buzz word to feel like they're future proofing themselves against disrupters. The reality is however (and has already been pointed out on here) that the majority of these organisations are too bureaucratic and risk averse to ever truly adopt it as intended.
You can't pretend to embrace Agile when there are still duties that involve making requests to other teams/offices which will potentially take a few days. Examples like these have been pretty common in one place I worked at:
- Business Analyst Barry has a chat with the Developers and decides that feature x should work a different way, alas he needs to seek approval through several layers which will take 3 days.. blocking the development team.
- System Administrator Simon needs to acquire a new virtual server to deploy a testing instance of a new product, alas he needs to liaise with another office and get approval from finance... blocking the QA team who can't test the new product until these requests are approved and actioned.
You can throw in all the buzzwords, have as many meetings for planning/retrospective/feedback purposes and create as many self-governing teams as you like - but if the real blockers and speedbumps are further up the hierarchy, or ingrained in the company via historic attitudes, then it's utterly pointless.
If I regularly go into places and see companies doing 25/30 minute daily scrum/standup meetings (Remember, "The Scrum Guide" says these should be a "15-minute time-boxed event") where they discuss all manner of banalities, then this tells you quite a lot about how many of the "adopters" actually adhere to the principles. It's rare to find the usual efficient "Yesterday I did X, today I'm doing Y, and I have no blockers"; and something as small and trivial as scrum/standup meetings should be incredibly difficult to get wrong!
This is one reason that I genuinely think you'll find quite a bit of success with doing consultancy work focusing on Agile practices, because even purely from a development point of view - I can safely say that many businesses struggle. I think if I spent more time talking outside of the development circle (CTOs down to developers) and spoke to more product-centric roles (BAs etc) then I'd see even more issues.
With regards to your point, you underline a key issue there: the CSM requires proper authorisation from the relevant people - i.e the IT Manager. In places where the structure means liaising with people in different offices, with different priorities and so on - it can quickly make organisational issues more apparent. It's just an example of what happens when the organisation claims to adopt something, Agile in this case, but merely use it as another layer over the top of their existing structure/procedures.
My daily struggles!
Our devs want to use agile methodology, our BA's want to also, however our PM's and SMT for some reason won't to change how we do things.
As has been said unless those above us allow the changes, it won't work. (It's a fairly old company with a small mindset, despite being a sector leader)
At the company i work at, we are attempting to embrace Agile - however this seems to have fallen on deaf ears with 2 of the 4 Scrum teams which has led to one team adopting a Scrumban approach, where they just move the goalposts re DoD or QA or even what is brought into the Sprint via the Planning meeting - one of the guys i regularly speak to tells me most of his work doesnt even have a JIRA ticket to associate points to - madness.
Help! Can anyone give me a better clearer definition.
Can anyone give me any assistance with writing user stories or more appropriately the acceptance criteria.
I am writing a number of user stories to explain a security credentials resetting process for a financial company.
We already have some mock ups which I am not sure if that makes this more difficult or do I ignore those whilst writing these?
What is the process of acceptance criteria?
Someone told me it's an If/Then process.
Along the lines of:
If a user has reset their credentials, they are able to log into the website.
Any tips and advice would be hugely appreciated.
p.s the SME's have been relieved of their duties... they lasted all of a few weeks.
https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/agile/user-stories
He also has a book called "User Stories Applied" which is a good intro do user stories.
Any suggestions on a more immediate collaboration tool? I'm fine keeping it here too, I'm just rubbish because there are about 15 things I want to reply to that I've missed.
My current contract finishes soon, and looking to move into Agile full-time, so any knowledge gained will be very useful;
SD, is this not a time for escalating upwards, suggesting that there is potential for Dev Team disharmony and disfunction? After all, it is all about being a self-organising functioning team.
Dazz, i've just come off a 2-day 'how to write effective user stories' course, so, fire away with the questions.
Anyone using/used TDD? - must admit, cant get my head around Given,When,Then ! Anyone got any ways that i can think of them differently?
I had our project lead tell me yesterday he didn't care about self-empowered teams or Agile, for that matter. So I'm going to try talking to him again Monday and explaining why it's so important. It's a very stressful time and he has no software experience. It's kind of the opposite of everything you'd want, and it's a good reminder why I swore I'd never be a Scrum Master or Agile Consultant again.
LR, I use it for other stuff so yeah I either have it open or messages eventually come through on my phone. I can try setting up a channel if there are no objections.
There's also some very good Slack channels you can sign up for, I have one for TechLondon and one for freelancers/contractors. Can be a good boost if you're ever procrastinating/inbetween work, and need some work related conversation to switch you on.
Because you were charged on the number of users you had (1-10 users = $10, 11-25 users = erh... $1,800!?) it was quite common to re-use accounts. This led to a scary bug whereby if you deleted a user, and then created a new one, it would get the last deleted users chat history. This made for some brilliant times when a new starter would log in and get the chat history of a bitter ex-employee who spent their notice period simply slagging people off via private messages..
How do i find the TechLondon and freelancers/contractors Slack channels you mention?
Here is http://techlondon.io/ - I'll try and dig the other one from my inbox, if not I'll look on my laptop for the details. I don't participate too often as I'm not too bothered about startup/creative stuff, but some of the conversations are very interesting, and often people suggest things that are worth thinking about; i.e workflow ideas, productivity tools etc.