The team went on site to conduct interviews and observations in 5 areas –

• Value delivery
• Agile engineering
• Project Management
• Product management
• Environment and Organizational Culture

In addition, the investigation took input on the demographics of the individual project being examined, the stakeholders involved and the competitive/regulatory environment in which the organization as a whole operates. Understanding the context in which an organization operates is crucial to understanding the optimal level of Agility, and thus, the plan of action. Understanding the goals of the organization is particularly important. Not every axis needs to be top-ranked to achieve the company’s goals. In fact, on this particular assessment we found that only one needed urgent attention – Project Management. More on this later.

I’d be very interested in hearing your views of this video.

Visibility is the key.

I’ll post up the subsequent videos as they are made available.

Topics will include:

> Product Vision and approaches to crafting a compelling overall vision for products
> User-Centered/Value-Driven design and approaches to incorporating user experience (UX) and software architecture early in the development process
> Explanation of the pitfalls of a lack of vision and so-called “hybrid” models for incorporating UX and architecture into Scrum Projects

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The decision to incur technical debt should be a conscious one.. However, unrealistic time tables and feature pressure often force a team to cut corners. There may be valid reasons to take technical shortcuts, but that decision should reside with the PM/PO, not the engineers building the product. Decisions about product quality should always sit with the individual(s) making scope, schedule, and resource decisions.

My company has written a white paper on this which you can review at here .

In a blog post on the SDTImes website (“Agile Making ALM Teams Work Faster, More Open”), Jeff Feinman takes a moment to share one aspect of a larger article he’s working on about agile life-cycle management (ALM), but that one aspect is a big one. According to Feinman, as he’s surveyed dozens of ALM companies about how they deliver their processes, ALL of the companies he’s talked to report that “100% of their customers are at the very least thinking about adopting agile processes.”

Though agile has soared in popularity over the past year or two, this is still a staggering update, illustrating just how widely agile adoption truly is. Still, one enduring impediment to adoption is the desire for organizations to implement a tool, rather than a process. Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud, explains: “Part of what takes a thing like agile some time to get adopted is, I think, naturally, we want to buy a tool, not a process. So if I hear about this thing called agile, I’ll say well, ‘Where do I buy the agile software package?’ It’s a little difficult to get people to change their processes.”

Of course, some tools are designed specifically to reinforce that process. As I’ve mentioned here before, my team manages its projects using Scrum. Because Danube’s tool ScrumWorks Pro was created with the framework in mind, it complements my team’s activities perfectly, while giving new team members a guide rail to help them follow Scrum’s processes.