Scrum

5 Whys: Sprint Failed – Team Did Not Deliver Committed Work

Applying 5 Whys is a good way to address the problems that you are facing on your teams. This thinking is very simple, just ask WHY multiple times till you reach to root cause. You can read more about 5 Whys here.

Some benefits of using this Lean technique are:

Helps identify root cause of a problem
Determine the relationship between different root causes of a problem
Very simple to use without any statistical analysis
Very useful when problems involve human factors or interactions

Asking 5 times WHY generally leads you to a root cause. In some cases you may reach in fewer iterations and in some it may take more than 5.

Now let’s apply this technique to our problem on hand.

Problem: Team failed in their sprint as they were not able to complete all the work committed.

100 Practices to Form Your Dream Scrum Team

by Avienaash Shiralige 12 Comments

Today I would like to share few practices that I have seen working wonders to teams following scrum. Not all the practices are followed by all the scrum teams. But by and large you see highly successful teams has many of them from this list.

Below is a mind map which you can download to see in it a bigger view or click zoom after you click on the image to see larger view.

I would like to hear from all of you regarding what else you would like to add to this list or modify any of them. Depending upon your feedback I will update this diagram and share updated version of this for everyone to use.

On purpose, I have not included XP practices just to keep focus only on Scrum.

What practices you would like to see or have experienced in your dream scrum team? Please write to me in the comments section.

Agile Transformation: 8 Mindset-Shifts You Make In Your Agile Adoption Journey

by Avienaash Shiralige 17 Comments

1. Senior Management

Agile is a silver bullet that will fix all issues is a myth. But Senior Management perceive this as fact. Agile and its frameworks have a great knack of bringing forward hidden organization issues like tendency to command and control, developers/testers taking short cut to quality, less focus & preparedness to test automation etc. Agile need for cross-functional roles and collaboration within the company can create issues in strictly functional organization structures. Companies need to adopt matrix structure

2. Senior and Middle Management

Their affinity towards metrics to compare productivity between different teams or an attempt to measure productivity at individual level may derail your agile efforts as it can be easily misinterpreted by teams and can work against Agile values.

3. Project Manager

Given focus on transparency and on pushing responsibility to the team, the Project Manager will be less of a task manager, and more of a problem solver, and will have to “let go” of a lot of previously held control. There is an increased emphasis on honesty, openness, and trust that may feel very different. Operating in an adaptive planning environment will feel very uncomfortable to many.

Agile Transformation:10 Potholes to Avoid When You Drive an Agile Car

by Avienaash Shiralige 16 Comments

Transforming your organization towards agile is like moving your organization to a new country with new culture and language with clear differences from how you work today. No amount of training will help you in dealing with different situations. I am compiling some common challenges & scenarios organization sees when they are new to agile. We all have to work proactively to sense these indicators or situations.

Agile Estimation: 9 Reasons Why You Should Use Story Points

by Avienaash Shiralige 12 Comments

A common question about estimating with points is, “Why Points? Why not in Days? Finally I need to do planning so I need to convert points to Days. Why this additional level of indirection?

In-fact I find story points as a good distraction to the team. Let me go over why having this “additional layer of indirection” provided by story points can be very useful.