The Toyota Kata is a management book by Mike Rother. it can be defined as a systematic, scientific set of routines that activate and mobilize people’s creative capabilities to meet challenging goals. In this blog post, Håkan Forss, a Lean/Agile Coach in Sweden, introduces the Toyota Kata as an alternative or as a complement to agile retrospectives.
If you put mayonaise in your cake because you don’t have butter, you aren’t being pragmatic, you’re being disgusting. I don’t care how good your experience is with the mayonaise in other recipes. I don’t care about it’s quality. It just doesn’t work in cake. The same goes for putting project managers and software architects in Scrum teams.
Agile software development challenges traditional project management approaches with self-organizing teams where individual members have more influences on the project success. How do you hire Scrum team member in this type of context. Mitch Lacey proposes to adopt the immersive interviewing technique to hire for agile software development teams. And like all good agile practices, it begins and ends with the team.
These days most dev organizations can configure themselves around agile thinking. That is only half the battle. Unless the rest of the company – be it sales, marketing, finance – also adopt the agile mindset, you risk launching misunderstood products eg. what seems like MVP to the development team, seems like buggy features to the marketing team.
In Scrum, the standard format of a user story is easy to understand: “As a [role] I want [something] so that I can [benefit].” However, there is more difficulties inside the project team to agree on what constitute the content of a user story. In this blog post, Steve Johnson explores this issue.
Linda Rising shares influence strategies that you can use to more effectively convince others to see things your way. You’ve tried and tried to convince people of your position. You’ve laid out your logical arguments on impressive PowerPoint slides—but you are still not able to sway them. Cognitive scientists understand that the approach you are taking is rarely successful. Often you must speak to others’ subconscious motivators rather than their rational, analytic side.
An old project management quote says “You can’t control what you can’t measure”. This is not different when you use Scrum. In this blog post, David Koontz proposes a list of metrics that can be used to assess the activity of Scrum teams.
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