Pragmatic Agilist

In the glory days when giants still walked the earth and the Agile Founding Fathers created "the team," they decreed that there would be three "team roles:" The Product Owner The Scrum Master The Team The product owner would be omnipresent and omni-knowledgeable, the scrum master would (somewhat mysteriously) "move boulders and carry water," and the team itself, the AFFs explained, would be "cross-functional."  Without being told how, the team would just swarm around the work and get it done:  analysis, design, development, testing, release, the works.  Boo-yah! It's a seductively simple fallacy of division to interpret the concept of "cross functional" team to mean a "collection of cross-functional individuals."  New agilists are quick to apologize that "we still have functional silos here" as though it would be much better if everyone could do all the same things.  Grab some equally skilled poly-funct...

As you join your teammates in your sparkling new agile team room , and you all do your best to quickly "become agile," I guarantee that despite being surrounded by brightly colored index cards and sticky notes, you may sometimes feel...angry.  Here you are, supposedly liberated to be "self managing," out from under the collective thumbs of your corporate hierarchy, and you realize that you are reminded briefly of the Lord of the Flies .  Your agile pilot has quickly, as promised, surfaced all possible risks and issues to the project.  That idea sounded good on paper.  In real life, you have ripped the comforting blanket of denial from yourselves, and now, rather than waiting for the UAT team to take the bulk of your business users' thwarted fury eighteen months from now, you already see problems right at the beginning of the project, where you've never seen them before: Inappropriate cost estimate Unrealistic project schedule Slap-dash business cas...

I don't mean to go all "woo woo" on you, but you already have a personal online brand.  Don't believe me?  Bring up your favorite browser and type your name in quotation marks ("Firstname Lastname"), and do a quick search.  Try it again with your middle initial added.  Did something come up?  THAT's it!  It's your personal brand! From http://tentblogger.com/blog-brand/ Do you like what you see?  If not, or even if you do, please, in this joyful holiday season, take some time to give yourself the priceless gift of strategic personal brand management.  Here are three personas to consider as you do it: The Shadow:  let's say you're a very private person, and you would like to minimize your online brand altogether.  Take some basic defensive measures.  If you participate in any online social media, learn how to use the privacy settings for each site you use, and set them to maximum.  You can set up Twitter, Facebook, an...

As a little palate cleanser, I thought I would do a quick blog today about my new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, in case any of you are thinking of buying a tablet. The Apple Newton Executive Summary :  I'm pretty sure you should get an iPad.   But there are some things I learned while trying to get used to my tablet that could help you make your own decision.  If you read "the literature" online, you will see lots of people comparing screen brightness, processor speed, and number of applications available in the respective Android and Apple application stores.  Yadda yadda.  Here's what you should really think about first. Battery management:   it turns out you will want to use the device on battery power.  It's meant to be a "portable" sort of thing.  So find out before you buy:  how many hours do you need to charge your tablet compared to the number of hours it runs without being plugged in?  How long is the battery l...

I've been having many conversations recently about how to set up the agile teams I'm coaching with the right Product Owner.  As we all know, the PO must be empowered to make decisions, yet must also be knowledgeable enough about what the software should do that she can make constant small decisions for the team so they don't have to wait.  The PO understands the big picture, understands the small picture, and can set priorities. I blogged a few months back about how the "Team Room" must be considered a metaphor , not a literal prerequisite to trying agile for the first time.  I know I am stepping into equally sacred cow pies here, but I am going throw my weight behind greater thinkers than I who have already posited that the "Product Owner" should be considered as a team, not an individual.  A small village, not a literal person.  Consider these "Product Owner Team" proposals from Mike Cottmeyer , Ben Linders , and Marc Löffler , specificall...

I've been pondering further difficulties of being a product owner , both silently and aloud, so yesterday I was happily bowled over by a new idea on the topic from my new ThoughtWorks colleague Jasper "Dutch" Steutel (@dutchdutchdutch for twitterphiles).  He calls his discovery the "design spike," and we ended up talking together about a related concept, the "value spike."  So what's this all about?  Aside from being "Vampire Month" on the Pragmatic Agilist? From http://io9.com/james-marsters The Problem It may be different in a small start-up or a firm well-organized into small, highly integrated business/technology verticals, but in a typical large corporate enterprise with matrixed silos, it is quite challenging for a Product Owner to speak for all of the stakeholders on a project. The PO must be able to speak fluently to the technical people on the team The PO must be able to provide one reliable set of priorities which ...

Product Ownership is very difficult.  Take a big step away from the Agile Manifesto and think for a moment about project stakeholders, user stories, and how they don't fit together as neatly in real life as they do in Mike Cohn's User Stories Applied , as awesome as that book is.  How in the world is it possible for there to be a single person standing in for all project stakeholders in negotiating with the team? From http://www.implementingscrum.com/2007/04/23/the-cast-of-implementingscrum-infamous-yet/ Conveniently, Cohn himself points out The First Fallacy of the Product Owner .  And that is, of course, that such a being actually exists : On an ideal project we would have a single person who prioritizes work for developers, omnisciently answers their questions, will use the software when it’s finished, and writes all of the stories. This is almost always too much to hope for, so we establish a customer team. The customer team includes those who ensure that th...