We keep forgetting to have the conversation

One of the common anti-patterns I see with new agile teams is that they try and do the requirements

analysis in a linear fashion. Something along the lines of PO -> Business BA-> Tech BA ->Architect ->Dev.

By the time it reaches the dev, it’s been several weeks and the requirement is so far abstracted from the original intent that it’s incorrect.

This can be exacerbated with a team that may be under pressure as they’ll default to previous waterfall behaviours and look to deflect the pressure onto someone else.

In nearly every scenario where I’ve walked into a project and they’ve told me they have an issue with the requirements and building stories in time, I witness the above scenario.

Get a room. Grab a whiteboard. Have a chat.

Shane Hastie did a session at Agile Australia 2015 on Product Ownership being a team sport which is a good read: 

“It’s not usually a problem with the tool, but the tools using the tool”

A wise agile coach once told me that.

All of the Agile ALM tools do similar things. Each have pro’s and con’s, but they’re all pretty similar.

If the solution to your problem is the tool – you’re doing it wrong and you may want to re-visit the agile manifesto.

On my most recent assignment, I have a PM that hates Jira. Can’t stand it.

Can’t tell me why.

Having mostly used Rally and Version-one, I was surprised by how simple the filter querying is in Jira and my ability to generate reports to find gaps in our delivery process.

So 2 days after all the Jira complaints – I gave the PM  a few dashboards and reports that gave them better visibility into their actual status.

And that’s when I found out they’d never logged into Jira before.

Thus ends this story - Please return to title.

Leadership communication.

It’s really important.

How you do it is also important. At my current workplace, I usually get a daily email from one of the senior Execs that is blasted out to the company. They’re not personal, but they’re generally pretty good.

At a previous company, the Leadership emails didn’t even come from people. They came from the furniture.

All the emails would come pre-fixed with “From the desk of xxx – CEO”.

Please don’t do that. It’s hard for someone to believe you care about them when you’ve delegated your communication to your desk. Unless your desk has a dream...

The Agile ceremonies are not for you

Well, they might be. But not always.

Working in a collaborative fashion is difficult when more and more often our teams are not co-located.

In an era of activity based working and off-shoring, it’s increasingly rare that the basic scrum model is adhered to.

The daily stand-up (Team Scrum, Scrum of Scrums) is the one daily opportunity on our projects when you know everyone is going to be there just in case you need to have a conversation straight after. 

It’s not about you. It’s about the people that might need your help.

Otherwise we resort to email. And we all hate email.