business analyst

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.

Story Mapping and/vs Process Maps

by ShriKant Vashishtha 18 Comments

One of the key philosophies of Agile software development is to have information radiators visible on the wall so that the progress of the team as well as what team currently is working on gets clearly visible to anybody who visits to the team area. That includes stakeholders, project managers, team or anybody from the organisation.

However, haven’t you observed that many times, as you look at the card-wall (Scrum Board), things are not very clear to you. Card wall may look like the mesh of user-stories with statuses in To Do, In Progress or Done. However some of the bigger questions are not clearly answered by just looking at user-stories.

Agile Offshore : Business Analyst – Complementing the Role of Product Owner

by ShriKant Vashishtha 2 Comments

Let’s take a scenario.

You have a product owner at distributed location but somehow he is not able to provide sufficient time to distributed team. Because of that team doesn’t get enough understanding of user-story.

Does it sound familiar?

Mostly it’s about PO getting involved in too many other things. That results in not having user-stories READY, analysed or communicated properly.

That brings another question related to suitability of people assigned for PO role. Not everybody is good in analysing and writing good user-stories.
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Agile Offshore: Create Effective and Decisive Product Owner Proxy to Offshore Team

by Avienaash Shiralige 6 Comments

Off-shoring in current market is a global economic and strategic need. Building Agile Offshore teams across boundaries and time zones is a different ball game. It has its fair share of challenges to work with. I shared few of those challenges and a possible approach to take in my earlier articles.

1. How to Address People and Communication Challenges
2.Distributed Agile:10 Best Practices of Successful Teams
3. Distributed Scrum: A Day In The Life Of A Distributed Team

You need to make few changes along your way to your normal routine to make it work. One challenge I often see is integration of offshore team with onshore team and to project/business vision.