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 .

Christine Crandell explores this topic in a recent article entitled, Why Your Boss Should Also Go Agile”, on the Scrum Alliance website. One commentator summed it up well, “There is growing understanding that transitioning to Scrum is a cultural change, not just a team process change. A culture change requires that “leaders” (wherever they are in the organization – including senior management people) understand the changes, understand what it means for them, and understand the objectives….it is critical to have your boss and his boss (and his boss…) support such a transition.”

Does your boss support you and your team’s adoption of agile? If not, what are there objections? If so, what helps them understand and support agile adoption?

So what are these hyper-productive teams doing differently to achieve such extraordinary results? Ryan Shriver has written an interesting article exploring this topic. http://www.gantthead.com/content/articles/255949.cfm Ryan’s article is based on Dr. Jeff Sutherland’s experience with hyper-productive agile teams.

In this article Ryan outlines the 12 best practices that Sutherland and others attribute to hyper productive team performances. In addition he describes the engineering practices that hyper-productive teams adopt.

In this article one of the best practices that Ryan covers is the concept of “pairing”, when two developers work side-by-side on one computer to implement a story. Working as a team they can work much more quickly than if they worked independently. In addition, pairing helps to mitigate risk and overdependence on key resources that can have a negative impact on productivity.
http://www.gantthead.com/content/articles/255949.cfm According to Ryan, while the practices he describes are simple in concept, those teams that stick with them have historically performed at levels that are hyper productive and far exceed their peers.