Use Burn-Down Charts to Discover Scrum Anti-Patterns

TL;DR: Use Burn-Down Charts to Discover Scrum Anti-Patterns

A burn-down chart tracks the progress of a team toward a goal by visualizing the remaining work in comparison to the available time. So far, so good. More interesting than reporting a status, however, is the fact that burn-down charts also visualize Scrum anti-patterns of a team or its organization.

Learn more about discovering these anti-patterns that can range from systemic issues like queues outside a team’s sphere of influence and other organizational debt to a team’s fluency in agile practices.

Use Burn-Down Charts to Discover Scrum Anti-Patterns: Ideal Case
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How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams—The Results of the Agile Maturity Survey

TL;DR: How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams

Is every organization suited to become ‘agile?’ If so: How to measure agility? And if not: Wouldn’t it be great figuring that out before embarking on a futile and expensive journey?

Back in October and November 2017, I ran a survey to identify contributing factors to an organization’s or a team’s agile maturity. In total, 86 people participated. Based on their answers, I aggregated a preliminary taxonomy of agility related factors.

This taxonomy was first presented on the Hands-on Agile Berlin meetup on November 30th, 2017.

On February 3rd, 2018, 20-plus people will join a hackathon to build an agility assessment framework based on this taxonomy. The goal of the workshop is to provide the first version of a tool that empowers agile practitioners to measure agility, be it an organization’s suitability for agile practices or a team’s progress on its path to becoming agile.

Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams — Age of Product
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The Overall Retrospective for Team and Stakeholders

TL;DR: The Overall Retrospective

After rebuilding an existing application on a new tech stack within time and under budget our team had an overall retrospective with stakeholders this week to identify systemic issues. We found more than 20 problems in total and derived eight detailed recommendations the organization will need to address when moving forward to the next level of agile product creation.

Read on and learn how we achieved this result in under two hours with an overall retrospective attended by 16 people.

Age of Product: The Overall Retrospective for Team and Stakeholders
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How to Align Scrum Teams

TL; DR: How to Align Scrum Teams

Do you remember the good old days when the organization started with its first Scrum team? And the new engineering kid on the block was “merely” supposed to deliver a potentially shippable product increment at the end of a sprint? When no one thought about how to align scrum teams?

The first team was to sound the bell for the upcoming change towards a learning organization. Little did we know back then about the challenges along that route. When teams 2, 3 and 4 joined, shipping a product increment at the end of a sprint became first complicated, and then complex.

It turns out that becoming agile does not only required to create (Scrum) teams. Reaping the full benefits of becoming agile, of becoming a learning organization built around software also requires changing engineering practices. Nowadays, it is all about continuous value delivery.

Agile Transition: How to Align Scrum Teams
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Agile Workspace: The Undervalued Success Factor — Agile Transition (Part 4)

TL; DR: Agile Workspace Means Choice Among a Diversity of Spaces

If you want your organization to become agile, adding more whiteboards to the workspace will not suffice. You have to abandon the idea that the workspace is an assembly line for white-collar workers. You need to let go Taylorism. We are now in the age of the creative worker.

To become agile – and reap its benefits such as becoming more innovative –, you need a diversity of workspaces to support all forms of creative work: focus, collaborate, learn, and socialize. Also, you have to let your creative workers choose which space is best suited for a task.

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The Big Picture of Agile: How to Pitch the Agile Mindset to Stakeholders

TL;DR: The Big Picture of Agile

Let’s face it: While your enthusiasm for the big picture of agile practices is admirable, your stakeholders will most likely be moved by one thought only at the beginning of the transition: “What’s in for me? How will I now have my requirements delivered?”.

Read on and learn about one way how to kick-off the transition to a learning organization by pitching a simplified version the big picture of agile practices to your stakeholders first.

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