Avienaash Shiralige

Agile Thinking: Continuous Improvement – ScrumMaster 1.0 to 2.0

Readers, Our “Agile Thinking” series is focussed on bringing agility into our thinking as this helps in moving from Doing-Agile to Being-Agile. You can read our earlier article in this series Agile Thinking: Stop Starting, Start Finishing.

This post talks about continuous improvement and obviously this can be applied everywhere irrespective of it is a process, practice or a role. From my recent experience, I would like to share today, how ScrumMater (SM) role evolved in some of the companies.

In many organizations, ScrumMaster role is defined something similar to what is shown below. For conversation sake let’s call it as SM 1.0 (see pic below)

In service industry projects, SM’s playing the role by book (SM 1.0) and expecting Product Owner(PO) from the client side to write stories, acceptance criteria and prioritization did not work due to some of the reasons stated below.

Webinar: How to Scale Agile using SAFe Framework

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

Scrum and XP have been working well for small teams. That works fabulously for small organizations. However implementing the same for large project portfolios, having teams with 100+ developers has remained very challenging from organization perspective.

There are many challenges while working with large teams like:

Breaking silos/departments in large organizations
Requirements focused on changes in enterprise architecture
Ability to work on highest business value features for program portfolio instead of for a project
Eliminate waste and reduce cycle time for the whole value chain
..and more

They can be mitigated by seeing scrum as organization design framework and using lean principles. In this session Shrikant will share his thoughts on how Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is used to solve this problem. We will take references from Spotify Scaling Case Study, SAFe and personal experiences.

Date: Feb 19th, 3:00 – 4:00 PM IST

Register Now!

How To Do Effective Capacity Planning on The Scrum Team

by Avienaash Shiralige 11 Comments

During sprint planning, scrum teams often face this challenge of sprint commitments. How many stories can we commit in this sprint? How to plan for the team capacity?

I ask teams to do commitment driven planning during early stages of scrum adoption. For you to commit to a sprint goal, you need to know current team capacity. Team capacity is calculated as per people availability in that sprint.

Let’s take an example.

Scrum Teams: Slow Down, to Go Fast Later

by Avienaash Shiralige Leave a Comment

Being two months away from my passion – agile coaching, I was exploring my other interests like un-schooling my kid, learning by traveling, and spent time experiencing natural birth. I was wondering if I should share this experience on this blog which is focussed only on Agile. But being agile is about doing different experiments and never stopping, hence I thought its worthwhile to mention it here.

It was great spiritual learning for me to prepare and experience natural(spiritual) birthing. It really taught us how different is our body than we actually perceive. To trust our own body instincts to take its own course of action rather than relying on systems(hospitals) which was built to address emergency scenarios and not normal or natural phenomenon like birthing.

This decision to slow down or cutting myself completely helped me to understands different facets of me. Slowing down helped me reassess my priorities and how I need to take my life forward. My schooling system has taught me how to make a living, NOT a life! Pity.

I was recently connecting with few teams and I saw teams “racing to the goal post” with NO goals scored often. Seeing such teams I feel we are used to speed in every aspect of life. Not sparing a thought to slow down to see how are we doing? And, even if we do that, we’re unable to bring any noticeable changes.

Drive Innovation By Creating Communities of Practice

by Avienaash Shiralige 3 Comments

In my last post, I discussed about sustainable pace and how nation and organisation culture comes in its way. One of the issues often found is people on scrum teams being too focussed and busy on the projects and having no time for their own research, self-study, upgrading themselves on new things etc. This leads to lesser learnings from outside world and limits the growth of people.

[pullquote]

don’t be afraid to fail.

be afraid not to try.

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Introducing or rather planning slack time on the team gives free time for people to work on their pet projects. Different organisations have done it differently, like:

Giving a break between sprints
Following 80/20 principle, 20% free time for people to think and work on their interest
One free day in a month
Having a small time reserved every sprint