Adopt Scrum

Beware of Scrum

2011-07-03T15:11:00.003-04:00

This article is dedicated to the people endlessly discussing relationship between Scrum and Agile. Scrum is one of the biggest process invention but it does not guarantee success. Even creators of Scrum accept that more than half of the Scrum implementation does not go well. Why is that? Scrum is critical but what is more critical than Scrum?

Through a creative analogy, the following video helps you understand why we need to be careful with Scrum implementations. Here are the key learning objectives:

What makes Scrum successful?
Are you failing because you are overdoing Scrum?
When not to use Scrum?

YouTube Verison of the Video:

Suggested Agile Reading:

Agility Explained - Back To The Basics

2011-06-15T23:55:00.000-04:00

It is easy to deviate from the goals we set. If you are on a agile journey then take a step back and try to validate if you are going on a right track. May be you are too busy in implementing a process that is not really agile. It doesn't hurt to validate. Do you know types of agility? What are agility drills? How can agility drills help you in successfully implementing strategy?

The following video provides a fresh perspective on agility and explains it with the help of real life examples. I really enjoyed making it. I hope you will find it valuable. Here are the key learning objectives:

What is agility?
Types of agility - Programmed and Random
Agility drills - preset, reaction, quickness
Where does Scrum fit in agility?

YouTube Version of the Video:

Suggested Agile Reading

Retiring Adopt Scrum Blog

2011-02-11T16:34:00.003-05:00

Followers!

I am retiring Adopt Scrum Blog as I am re-branding it to reflect my new focus. You can follow me at my new blog: http://www.agilehelpline.com/. I am dedicated to make this new blog worthwhile for you to follow. If you are interested in helping me out by co-authoring new blog then please let me know.

Thanks,
Yogesh.

Agile Presentation For The Beginners

2011-02-09T23:12:00.001-05:00

Welcome to the blog!

I prepared a presentation for my volunteer Agile coaching sessions to help organizations initiate their agile journey. You may find it helpful too. High level of agenda for the presentation is:

Agile/Scrum in a nutshell
Why Agile? (Business Reasons, Logical Reasons, Process & Organizational Reasons)
When not to use Agile?
What next?

Your feedback is highly appreciated. You can find presentation here.

Good Scrum Analogies

2011-02-08T09:30:00.000-05:00

Scrum is...

Yoga of software development which keeps organizations healthy. If you need Yoga then your Organization needs it too.*
Iterative like paychecks which gives sense of achievement every 1-4weeks.*
Recipe for hyper-productive teams. *
An innovative approach to getting work done.
A common sense a.k.a ScrumSense.*
Like a roundabout which heavily relies on discipline and personal responsibility.
A metaphor for collaboration
An art of optimizing impact of critical resources
A complex adaptive systems and emergent behavior
A mirror
Totally relaxing & fun

Be creative and suggest more...

* Original ideas. Not copied from other sources.

Be honest to yourself and to your team

2011-02-07T23:41:00.002-05:00

~83000 Certified Scrum Masters. Many times more agile users. This growth is phenomenal just like a perfect storm.

Do you know any person who can go back to waterfall after 2 years of scrum? I don't. BTW, I personally know hundreds of people moving to agile after years of experience in waterfall. Why is that?

"Think and act" to learn to "inspect and adapt". Isn't "adaption" one of the best quality of humans? Why do you need to fall in a trap of non-adaptive processes?

Be honest to yourself and to your team before giving excuses for not using it.

Free Scrum/Agile Workshop

2011-01-23T14:04:00.001-05:00

I have an extensive agile/scrum implementation/coaching experience. I am hoping to apply for Certified Scrum Coach (CSC), hence, I would like to enrich my experience further by helping other scrum teams in need. I was instrumental in transforming distributed waterfall teams into highly effective scrum teams, developing scrum maturity model, training and coaching etc. I will be glad to do half or full day workshop without any cost. If your organization does not have budget but still looking for a good agile/scrum coach then feel free to email to me. I am offering this mostly because I have passion for scrum/agile and would to contribute to the community.

Based on some of the requests I got so far, please note that my itention is not to provide training. To justify my time commitment, I am mostly interested in helping teams in need to mature themselves in their agile journey. I can only afford to do 3-4 such workshops in the next few months, hence, let me know quickly before these spots fill up.

Agile - A disciplined approach for project management

2010-03-15T16:36:00.002-04:00

I am working on "Agile - A disciplined approach for project management" located at: http://tiny.cc/Mz5OF. Main objective of this presentation is to help traditional PMs to easily relate agile concepts with what they are used to do. Your feedback to improve this idea is welcomed.

Excited to be CSP

2010-03-15T10:13:00.002-04:00

Agile based outsourcing/contracting: Tips for Customers & Suppliers

2010-03-13T13:51:00.000-05:00

Scrum/Agile based outsourcing/contracting
Scrum/Agile is revolutionary. It is changing the world very rapidly. Very soon, customers will stop signing deals if a supplier is not "Scrum Ready". It is already a key part of many customer's evaluation criteria for supplier procurement. Being "Scrum Ready" provides a solid competitive advantage as ScrumSense is prevailing with each passing day.

Customers are getting mature to handle Scrum. Personally, I see less issues from customer perspective but more issues from supplier perspective. Many supplier development teams claim that they are "Scrum Ready" but not really live up to the Scrum standards. This may cause some customers to loose interest in Scrum.

Tips for customers and suppliers

If you are a Supplier:

Remember, you will be out of the race soon if your company does not have strong experience of Scrum/Agile.
Don't fake that your team is agile as customers will figure it out and results will not be positive. Just doing monthly sprints and daily scrum calls do not make your team agile. Be agile in a true sense and be honest to your customers. If you team is learning agile then say it to them to set the right expectations. Customers will appreciate honestly.
Invest in your team development both from process and technical point of view. You will need cross-functional team members with a strong experience of test driven development (TDD) and continuous integration. Invest now to yield exceptional results in the near future.
Develop a few scrum coaches/trainers in your company to internally train people. These coaches/trainers can also help your customers to gauge their maturity and provide consultancy.
Best way to learn something is by practicing it more. Motivate your staff to contribute to the agile community.

If you are a Customer:

Give Scrum/Agile supplier a try. You have nothing to loose and you will get opportunity to see the working software every few weeks.
Invest in good engineering practices. If you want your supplier to cut costs at the expense of good engineering practices (e.g. TDD/CI), then your end results are going to suffer immaterial of the methodology in use.
Scrum is based on the trust, hence, be cooperative and trust your supplier.
Ideally, one or more of your representatives will be good candidates to play the role of product owners. In order to succeed, product owners need to interact heavily with the Supplier Scrum Teams. Be prepared to dedicate someone with the right attitude to play this role. Please send product owners for the Scrum training as it will make a huge difference.
Scrum planning and reporting is different from the traditional waterfall or project management reporting, hence, it is important that your management team understand the basic concepts of Scrum planning and reporting. I am sure that your vendor will be happy to train you for this.
Most importantly, only get into a Scrum/Agile project if your team has an open mind to learn. Don't be a control freak just because you are a customer as this attitude will not help in the long run.

Scrum contracts

First of all, let's review the advantage of applying scrum in the contracting business:

Customers can define product backlog as a starting point which will be further used to define release backlog and sprint backlog based on the priority of the user stories (requirements). Product Owner (a customer representative) has full control over the backlog and priority of user story in it.
Scrum planning process gives opportunity to the customers to adjust requirements as per their stakeholder feedback after each sprint. As product owners are part of the scrum teams, they get more visibility in the process and progress. Burndown charts are great control points.
Quality is the key for Scrum process. A good scrum team manages to deliver product with nearly zero defects.
Most importantly, customers are entitled to see a working software after each sprint.
If you have read about the outsourcing maturity model, "trust" is considered to be a key factor for matured outsourcing contracts. Scrum framework is entirely based on trust, hence, it enforces outsourcing maturity from the beginning. In the end, scrum provides a win-win situation for customers and suppliers.

All contracts fall into one of the following two main categories. All other contract types are minor variation of these.

Time & Material (T&M) Contracts:

Intent of this type of contracts for scrum projects is similar to the traditional T&M contracts - customer pays for the resources utilized based on the preset cost structure. Scrum makes these type of contracts more meaningful by adding a proven framework.

Fixed Price Contracts:

Fixed price contracts are nothing but commitment from the vendor to deliver pre-defined project scope within the budget. This gives peace of mind to the customer after contract is signed but they need to do a lot of upfront work to ensure that requirements are documented properly with almost no ambiguity. Now think deeply about it - in the current dynamic business environment, how can someone be too sure that he understands business requirements very clearly few months in advance?
Industry analysis shows that upfront requirements with no opportunity to get feedback/adjust, during the development process, result in a large number of useless features for the end users. In other words, project may meet the budget targets but it may not yield the required value from money because of wasted features.
Do you still think that fixed price contracts are good for you? Fine, you can use Scrum in the fixed price projects but think out-of-the-box. Allow your contract to adjust requirements as per the market situation and customer feedback. Define your scope as prioritized backlog and ask your supplier to work on the highest priority items first without any exception. If you have any compulsive reason to adjust the requirements in the middle of the contract term then add new requirements but take out some pre-defined requirements from the bottom of the prioritized list. This concept is also called "exchange requests". This is just one of the idea - apply ScrumSense and you will figure out how to use powerful Scrum framework in your favor.

A Project Story

I am representing a customer's view. My team is fairly distributed in 6 counties with multiple suppliers and our own development resources. Like any good development group, our team was very keen in becoming agile (from waterfall) with very good support from the executives. We took some initiatives to expedite Scrum adoption but pace was very slow.

We needed another supplier for various reasons. It was a good opportunity for us to look for a supplier with solid agile experience. We searched all over the globe, requested many companies for information and picked few companies in various geographies for detailed evaluation. As you can understand, cost of living in all geographies are different, hence, comparing vendors based on cost was a senseless thing. Our focus was on evaluating vendors based on our core needs - agile experience and quality of engineers. We ended up selecting a small small supplier because of their agile strength. We clearly set the expectation during contract discussions for the partner that we look forward for them to make us agile. This supplier provided us agile coaches, evaluated our group's maturity, and developed plans for improvements. Moreover, they never compromised on agile values and never hesitated in having honest conversations. It was amazing to see how well our development resources working with this supplier's resources. Our agile adoption was very quick since then.

Learning from this project in a nutshell:
- In the present global economy cost is a relative term. You can't compare suppliers based on the cost. Important thing is to find value for money.
- Bigger is not always better - smaller companies think more seriously about agile.
- Relationship was based on trust and value. I have developed a partner maturity model. I will expand on that in future blogs.
- Agile works - having experienced people makes it easier to adopt.

Summary

Customers, give scrum a try for better results for you.
Suppliers, invest in your team development to become truly agile. Customers will like you more and your revenue will hit the roof.

Creating Scrum Network in Toronto

2010-02-12T15:39:00.004-05:00

I am creating a Scrum Network in Toronto which is focused on the following objectives:

Build a local network for Scrum professionals in Toronto
Promote Scrum and agile
Share learning and experience

Who should join:

Believes in building strong communities
Passionate about scrum and agile
Interested in networking

Web Address:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrum_network

How to Join:

Self-Organization: The Secret Sauce for Improving your Scrum team

2010-02-07T23:42:00.000-05:00

Hyperproductive Distributed Scrum Teams

2010-02-07T23:28:00.000-05:00

Agile Hitler is agressive but has some good points

2010-02-04T00:32:00.000-05:00

BTW, You don't need a Hitler to do this. A self-organizing team with agile mentality will be sufficient to change the end results :). Have a look:

Being Agile is my favourite thing

2010-02-03T23:53:00.001-05:00

Scrum is all about common sense called ScrumSense

2010-01-20T18:10:00.006-05:00

You need to deliver working product (value) faster and earlier as per the customer needs. Can you do so by doing the following steps in a sequence: define --> design --> develop --> test -->deploy? Just by applying common sense, you can find out most of these steps can be parallel. If you apply more common sense then you will realize that many of the steps can be automated to yield even better results. Well, someone correctly said that common sense is not so common, hence, waterfall model survived too long.

Two common men's (Ken Schwaber & Jeff Sutherland) common sense was tingling, hence, they consolidated bunch of common sense practices and named it Scrum. Then a bunch of folks with common sense joined them to spread common sense through out the world as ScrumAlliance. Interestingly, you can pay to get trained and certified for learning, adopting, implementing and spreading this common sense (ScrumSense). As a result, ScrumSense is much more common these days. Welcome to the world of ScurmSense. Don't just learn to use it but spread it every day. Let ScrumSense prevail!

Key Engineering Practices for Successful Scrum

2010-01-20T00:52:00.003-05:00

Scrum is a team-based approach to iteratively, incrementally develop systems and products when requirements are rapidly changing. In a 2-4 weeks sprint, can you afford to wait for testing to start after code development is over? Don't you need to contain QA and defects within the sprint? What engineering practices do you need to deliver products iteratively and incrementally?

Test Driven Development (TDD) and Continuous Integration (CI) are the key engineering practices you need to deliver a shippable product after every sprint. Your scrum team needs to test often (daily builds) and automatically (using various tools for TDD). These engineering practices makes your team agile and ready for scrum.

Scrum works as a wrapper for the existing engineering practices. Hence, if you have poor engineering practices then scrum wrapper cannot yield good results. Improve your engineering practices first in order to make scrum wrapper work for you successfully. You may also think of Scrum as a mirror...

Reference: What is scrum?

Welcome to the world of blogging

2010-01-20T00:20:00.009-05:00

Scrum is the perfect topic to venture into the world of blogging. After working in the waterfall software development model for years, Scrum provides freshness and makes software development/ management simple, result oriented and enjoyable. I am excited to share my Agile/Scrum experience through this blog spot.