Articles and videos on creating and managing cross-functional Scrum teams: scrum master, product owner and development team.
Should you track individual performances in Scrum and how do you do it? Nanda Vivek says that there is only one answer and this is “No”. Measuring individual productivity is against the spirit of Scrum and the article discusses the importance of being helpful and collaborative in teams. The author however does not give guideline on how to deal in this case with the individual review that is a common practice in many large organizations.
This article focuses on the obstacles to using Agile in a distributed team environment and recommends how to counter them with what is called “de-Agile.” De-Agile is tailoring Agile to fit your team by taking out processes that don’t make sense and tweaking those that need to be modified to suit your needs. In a distributed team environment, de-Agile is mostly about removing the sense of being distributed. You need to educate each team member about the additional communication responsibilities required when working with remote team members and emphasize the importance of being open and available.
When properly implemented, the Scrum framework enforces simple constraints that lead a team to self-organize into a state that achieves 5 to 10 times performance improvement versus traditional approaches. However, the majority of Scrum teams is unable achieve this objective.
This article presents the changes needed to create collaborative agile teams. It explains that you need to modify in your traditional project management team both the process, the way people get work done, and how people work together.
“An adequate ScrumMaster can handle two or three teams at a time. If you’re content to limit your role to organizing meetings, enforcing timeboxes, and responding to the impediments people explicitly report, you can get by with part time attention to this role. The team will probably still exceed the baseline, pre-Scrum expectation at your organization, and probably nothing catastrophic will happen.
in this blog post, John Piekos explains how the ScrumMaster and Product Owner roles in Scrum are much more demanding than the Project and Product Manager roles of traditional project approaches. With frequent “potentially shippable product increments”, he believes that full-time effort is required from all members in order to be successful.
The five stories presented in this article, mostly based on real life, might help you see how Agile can become mechanical and what you should do about this. You will also learn some solutions that could help to solve all five symptoms. We need to allow people to act like people and not try to force them into a machine model that we have created for them.
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