Agile Buddha

Demystifying Agile, Getting to its Core

Agile

Enterprise Agile Transformation – Are You Able to See Big Elephant?

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Implementing Agile in a big enterprise is not an easy task. The metaphor I sometimes use for big enterprise is to compare it with Elephant. It’s very easy for a small living being to move and maneuver. However when it comes to elephant, it requires time to build momentum and when it actually moves, it moves slowly.

People involved in Agile transformation get frustrated because of all perceived delays. Frustration is understandable but not sure if much can be done other than understanding the simple reality that you are dealing with an elephant and not a tiger or mouse.
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FAQ: Why Story points? Why not map story points with time? What’s the issue?

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As long as customer isn’t interested in throughput or customer trusts the team, whatever way you size or estimate doesn’t really matter. But that doesn’t happen very often. Whenever customer questions about team throughput, it becomes challenging to answer using hour-based estimation as time taken to complete any particular task deflates over time.

Some teams follow capacity based estimation technique where they identify the number of hours available in a team for the entire sprint duration. Based on that they pick up stories in a sprint. Again here as well, there is absolutely no way to know any change in team throughput as size for which capacity is defined isn’t defined.
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Spotify Scaled Agile Case-Study – Lessons For Smaller Teams

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A while back, Henrik Kniberg published an excellent case study on Scaling Agile @ Spotify. Though case study is specific to Agile scaling experiences at Spotify, some practices are equally important for smaller teams as well. This post tries to capture the essence from smaller team’s perspective.

Break Silos

A lot of organizations still works in functional silos.

For instance, in a bank, there may be one team for web banking, another team for home-loans and yet another one for mainframe based core-banking. Business features however in general cut across all these teams.

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