People and team member management for Agile project management and Scrum software development teams.
For best results from Agile, you need a solid team. If you belong to, manage, or lead an Agile team, you’ve probably seen that process alone doesn’t translate to great results – and that having a cross-functional group of 7 +/- 2 “resources” doesn’t either. Instead, what makes Agile come to life is the team’s motivated, engaged individuals who communicate, collaborate, and respond effectively. In many organizations, teams rely on their leaders and managers to help them grow and become stronger.
The first value of the Agile Manifesto is to prefer “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. But how can you know if your individuals and your teams like your current Agile approach. In his article, Henrik Kniberg present a simple tool to assess the health of your Scrum teams.
In large Agile projects where a Scrum team cannot deliver the full system, you have different options to organize your team. You can use feature teams that work on a set of user stories or component teams that work on a subsystem or component. In his blog post, Michael Valenta reports his experience as a ScrumMaster from the usage of features teams.
This talk provides a is a reflection on what Michael De La Maza has learned as an Agile Coach about communication, emotional stress and team organization.
It’s very easy to become hierarchical and turn into a “bank” when software company is growing fast. Is there a way to avoid that? How to keep the focus on value creation? What about Value departments, not Functional departments? This presentation shares ideas what we can learn from Scrum and apply in organizational design. It shares hypothesis how a company could look like when everybody is focused on value creation.
When companies transition to Agile, it is not too difficult to find new roles for member of the current software development teams. Finding a place for middle management in the new organization is not so easy and some people even advocates to get rid of them. In this blog post, Em Campbell-Pretty brings her own middle management perspective to this discussion.
One of the technical practices of Agile software development is to support cross-functional teams where members perform multiple activities like requirements, coding and testing. In their book “Being Agile”, Leslie Ekas and Scott Will discusses the difficulties of creating a whole team.
