Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
Scrum and Kanban can be considered as the two main Agile approaches. In a simplistic view, Scrum is often categorized as a product development framework and Kanban is preferred when you want to manage flow or maintenance activity.
Uncertainty in the Product Backlog is a big risk for the schedule of a Scrum project. The problem is that the full scope of the release can be quite hard to estimate because the requirements are not well-know early on. Confounding this problem is that frequently the release date is a hard deadline.
Delivering business value is certainly a major goal when you adopt an Agile approach like Scrum. If determining business value is already difficult inside an organization, the topic is even more complex when the project is performed by an external Agile provider. This article lists some of the important questions that should be answered about delivering value when you are contracting Agile projects to a consulting company.
There is plenty to fret about when you are running or on an agile team, but your measure of estimation should be one of them. In fact, despite what you may have heard from consultants or others, Scrum is not prescriptive about any particular estimation measure, let alone story points. Many practitioners support story points and it is been very in vogue for a while now, you should do whatever you and your team feels most comfortable with.
At the beginning of Agile, there was a tendency to aim at “pure” Agile, following the Scrum rules by the book. Even if there might be still Scrum cargo cult implementations, many Agilists have realized that Agile is more about continuous improvement and value delivery in a specific context than staying stand-up in daily status meetings. In this article, Mark Haynes discusses the Scrumban approach that borrows tools from both Scrum and Lean Kanban.
“Responding to change over following a plan” is one of the value of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The COVID-19 pandemic is certainly a disruptive event that caused a lot of changes in the way organisations work. In this article, Hannah Price shares her view on how many employees embraced the concept of agile without even realising it.
I recently posted a quote from a conference saying that “Removing hierarchy and cross-team dependencies made space for strong collaborative teams.” Interestingly, I got many comments and questions about it. So let’s talk about hierarchy and why we don’t need it in Agile space.
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