I’ve worked in a multi-site Process Improvement Team that adopted an Agile way of working.The team used a set of “Golden Rules”. These rules helped them to understand the agile approach, and to work together in a smooth, efficient and positive way. These golden rules were formulated based upon principles from the Agile Manifesto, EVO, Open Space Technology, Solution Focused, Root Cause Analysis, and Retrospectives.
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IT is viewed by many people as being something technical. They have a vision of managers with lot’s of plans, documents and spreadsheets, and nerds that are sitting behind their computer doing the “real work”. It may be out there, but I don’t see that often. What I see are people working together to deliver software solutions that work, which help their customers in their daily work, and deliver business value to the company. Communication and collaboration is essential to make the people that are doing this successful. So for me, soft skills really matter in IT! What do you think?
Read MoreThe agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. But sometimes teams struggle to figure out what an agile retrospective is? And they wonder why they should do them? Without further ado, here’s an introduction to agile retrospectives, to help you to get started with them.
The Agile Retrospective
An agile retrospective, or sprint retrospective as Scrum calls it, is a practice used by teams to reflect on their way of working, and to continuously become better in what they do.
Read MoreOrganizations want to mature their IT or R&D software development and do that by using CMMI for example. They set a goal: we have to get at CMMI level 3! And expect that their employees do whatever they can to achieve that goal. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always go like that. Why do you want to mature, “what’s in it for me” is the question an employee will ask himself. What does work is the improvement of skills, by helping employees to become more capable. The CMMI continuous with CMMI Roadmaps makes this possible.
Read MoreFew months ago I published a blog on Measuring and controlling product quality for iterative large(r) projects. I made a promise to blog about how we steered product quality in Agile teams, using Fault Slip Through. The approach is to reduce quality risks by deciding in the planning game when and how to invest in Quality. Let’s take a look how you can steer product quality in Scrum teams.
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