Agile : Self Aligned Team Are the Best Teams

Agile Software Methodology  Believes in Servant Leadership. This Leadership is from the Bible.:-

Jesus Christ mentions in the Bible, "For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves" Luke 22:27.

It is key to follow this style in Agile. You cannot question the team often and micro-manage people. You need to serve the team and facilitate the team and the team are empowered to make various decisions. You provide the goals and ask them to achieve it and you observe and continuously check how to help them and continuously keep giving them options and ideas of they are running into problems and let the teams are empowered to  decide how to solve it. This way the teams will be self-aligned. The Best Teams are always Self Aligned Teams.

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Agile Principle of Servant Leadership Comes from Jesus Christ

Agile Software Methodology  Believes in Servant Leadership. This Leadership is from the Bible.:-

Jesus Christ mentions in the Bible, "For who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one who is at the table? But I am among you as one who serves" Luke 22:27.

It is key to follow this style in Agile. You cannot question the team often and micro-manage people. You need to serve the team and facilitate the team and the team are empowered to make various decisions. You provide the goals and ask them to achieve it and you observe and continuously check how to help them and continuously keep giving them options and ideas of they are running into problems and let the teams are empowered to  decide how to solve it. This way the teams will be self-aligned. The Best Teams are always Self Aligned Teams.

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Why People Dont LIke Agile? or Why are people Anti Agile? (How to Overcome it)

Why People Dont LIke Agile? or Why are people Anti Agile?

 Daily  Stand up Meetings : Have to have daily stand up meetings and need to be in office at a particular time. 

 Peer Pressure : Constant peer pressure to deliver  stories. 

 Less Design and often teams feel road-map to code is missing. 

Bigger Picture: Team does not feel they have the bigger picture and they work on assigned stories. 

Requirements Constantly Change  and teams that don't have flexibility starts to dislike it. 

Dislike Stories : New teams dislike stories and likes to see the requirements and functionality in a visible manner in the form of Functional Specification document, GUI,etc.

Customer needs Constant Demo: this leads to team to feel they have to deliver often and feel pressured. 

Micro Managed : Teams feel they are being micro managed. since the scrum master often run the meeting like a status meeting. 

[Most of the issues are since you are new to agile, once you understand the spirit of agile and change your mindset to agile mindset you will love agile. Scurm Masters, Managers, teams needs to have multiple training to understand their roles well before they play it. ]

Customers Love Agile

Customers Love Agile: Since they can see results faster since no upfront lot of time wasted on design.

 Customers Love Agile:  since they can take in new requirements often and across the release and no freeze to requirements most of the time. 

 Customers Love Agile since they can constantly see new sub-features working regularly and can               comment and change things in case they feel things needs to change for the sub-feature. 


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Agile Retrospective Make it Pro-active and not Reactive For Better Efficiency and Results.

Agile Retrospective Make it Pro-active and not Reactive For Better Efficiency and Results.

Agile retrospective team gets together end of every sprint/iteration to check what went right and what did not go right and what improvements needs to be done. In this phase please be aware that teams often take actions for things that did not go right. These actions have to be taken so that it does not just solve the problem with the actions but in future in all the upcoming iterations and releases these similar issues should never occur again. So a framework or mechanism has to be made in place so that this issue never occurs again and it will proactively solve this issue for all releases.  Let me give an example:-

Example:

Retrospective Issue: Defects did not have adequate impacting testing leading to more induced defects and defect testing field in the BugZilla tool did not have this field filled.

 Corrective Action: Ensure team fills the impacting testing column to the BugZilla tool (so that adequate impacting testing is done for the defect and constant audit is done).

Preventive Action: Ensure that the impacting testing column in the Bugzilla is a mandatory field to fill (so that team will do impacting testing for the defects) and start automating all the impacting test cases (if not automated).

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Agile Stand-up Meeting is Not a Full Fledged Status Meeting (No Micro Management is allowed)

 Agile Stand-up Meeting is Not a Full Fledged Status Meeting 

Agile Stand up is not a full-fledged status meeting. Often Scrum Masters ask many questions in the meeting to the team members of the status and they get frustrated and they often feel they are micro-managed and the short meeting becomes a long time. Even though stand up meetings turn out to be to some extend as a status meeting, it is not a full-fledged status meeting.  Agile Stand up meeting is done with the intention to know what he/she achieved yesterday,  what he/she will do today  and what help or obstacles are blocking them to achieve it and how the scrum master and management can help them to achieve it. The teams are empowered to make decisions and meeting is required to be short. Scrum Masters cannot become micro-managers in this meeting. 

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Velocity Increase (Marry Agile and Technical Management Strongly)

Velocity Increase (Marry Agile and Technical Management Strongly)

Often you find in-spite of doing everything done right in Agile, people-management, project management, process management and communication management. The velocity of team is not going high. This is because for technical folks you need strong technical management. Technical team’s needs technical directions and technical saviness build into them to increase the velocity. Technical Management includes:-

·         Identifying along with Architects who are the technical leads in the team.

·         Make Design and Architecture scores so that nothing is lost during it.

·         Identify clear review time for code review, etc and which lead will be handling it.

·         Identify technical trainings the team needs and propose to managers.

·         Identify latest technologies and tech talks to the teams.

·         Identify technical risks.

·         ,etc,etc,etc

If a developer has a strong road map in his mind before he codes due to good design and understanding, he will be able to code it faster and increase his velocity. This is one way a developer can increase velocity.

Agile Can Make Your System Fragile (if not implemented right)

Agile Can Make Your System Fragile (if not implemented right)

Agile if not implemented in the right way can make your system Fragile. Often when teams implement Agile they get very busy trying to implement the standup meetings, retrospective meetings, etc and teams are in hurry to get the stories accepted or completed but they keep inducing lot of defects to the legacy code since the developers and testers wants to test only the story, but not the impacting areas. Also teams can potentially not have a measurement of the stability of the legacy features and keep on building more features and accepting stories. This can lead to a very fragile system.  The spirit of agile has to be understood more in depth before actually implementing it.



 

Simple and Effective 10 Time Management Guideline for Any One

Time Management is so important for every one. If you are working in an office or  house-wife,etc Time Management plays a key role to your efficiency and success. Follow these few rules to help you manage your time successfully:-

1) List down your tasks at the beginning of the day

2 Put Priority for each task

3)  Provide time for each task so that you and work on each task in the order of priority and can manage the time well.

4) Understand the difference between important tasks and Urgent Tasks. Not all tasks are Urgent.

5) Don’t write high level tasks that will take much time to, do always write tasks that can be accomplished in 1 or 2 hours.

6) Delegate were ever necessary.

7) Work always only as per the priority only

8) Don’t check your mail every 5 minutes it will cause your mind to get crowded with many things and you can loose focus. and priority to the tasks in hand. Check your mail only once every hour or 45 minutes.

9) Always keep room to accommodate new dynamic tasks or activities

10) Always work as per your KPI or that aligns with your expected goals.

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Agile Software Methodology Requires a Mindset Change While Implementing it.

Agile Requires a Mindset Change

Several Years back as a Development Manager when I moved to Agile Model, I could not appreciate Agile and could like it initially since I did not understand the spirit of Agile and did not have the  Agile Mindset.  Many companies adopt Agile and teach team members and ask them to practice Stand Up Meetings, Story Wall Creation, Retrospective Meetings ,etc and find that in the first project they are not actually getting the benefits of Agile. 
          Agile Requires a Mindset Change in terms of how you view requirements, how you thin slice it, how Stories are created, how you do with less design and code it fast and complete the story so that you can make faster working software, how you do customer demo to get customer feedback quickly, how you learn fast by doing retrospective at short intervals and much more.  The real benefit can be obtained fast only if the team members are taught to learn and practice Agile with an open mind and what are its goals so that they can tune and Synch to the spirit of Agile. The word Agile means "Fast". Your team will get truly Fast Results if team can be trained this way. 


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