People and team member management for Agile project management and Scrum software development teams.
As Agile product and project management approaches are adopted by large organizations, they have to coexist with a typical entity of big companies: the Project Management Office (PMO). A recent report from ESI International explores how the PMO staff views the challenges of implementing Agile in their organizations.
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.
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.
Adopting new software development approaches like Agile and Scrum is always a challenge. There is a natural tendency for part of an organization to resist changing and some prejudices exist against Agile, mainly due to a lack of knowledge. This article discusses these misconceptions and provides some tips on how to overcome these prejudices to get Agile adoption on track in your organization.
If you asked software developers about Agile, there are chances that a majority will discuss it with words like “Scrum”, “sprints” or “retrospectives”. However Agile is not just a collection of techniques and practices, but it is more a state of mind or a culture. This is the topic of this book written by Pollyanna Pixton, Paul Gibson and Niel Nickolaisen.
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