AGILE IN ACTION

Here is the position statement on certification from the Agile Alliance . I've highlighted what I believe to be the key points.

Taken from Andres Taylor's Top ten things ten years of professional software development has taught me:

It's not easy saying 'No' and sticking to it. It can be so painful that we sometimes avoid it just to avoid short-term pain, only to find later that the long-term pain is even worse. We can feel mean for saying 'No' and so we offer reasons that justify our decision and soothe our bad feelings. But each reason you offer may be countered by a reasonable argument for taking the opposite position. And eventually you might surrender and change your decision to 'Yes'. If you can't say 'No' and stick to it, your 'Yes' is meaningless and it's gonna hurt.

A strategy is a plan of action to achieve an overall goal. But when a meeting convened to devise a new organisation structure produces the same kind of hierarchy, just dressed up a little differently, it's more like a tradegy than a strategy. It's a stradegy , if you like. Strategising about organisation without considering the affect of corporate culture probably isn't going to get you the improvements you want because culture eats strategy for breakfast . When a company is pickled, it's not necessarily blind to its problems but it is often blind to the root causes of those problems. It's strategy for change is preoccupied with fixing symptoms.

If anyone needs a ready-to-go agile team, experienced in XP and Scrum and based in the UK, get in touch . The team I've been working with over the past year will be available around the end of April and we're looking for a fresh challenge. This team is the best I've worked with to date. It's a real team . It's cross-functional, self-organising, and innovative. The people are accomplished practitioners with values and principles. And we have a lot of fun together. It's a team that delivers.

Via Peopleware

Marco Abis says:

I've seen groups of people masquerading as teams. But I don't believe that they are teams. There isn't a team spirit. They're simply groups of people that have been asked, or more likely told to work together on something. You don't build teams. You grow them. And in the right environment their growth is a natural phenomenon. As a team grows, you start to see cohesion. The people in the team bond and jell and the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. In self-organising teams it's understood that it's better to succeed together than to succeed because of some individuals and not others. A team grows around a shared vision or goal accompanied by shared criteria that define success. (These should be set out in a charter , constructed by and unanimously agreed to by the whole team, i.e. every single person in the team, at the very start of the project). A vision that is shared unites the people in the team and focuses their intent. They pursue the attainment of their vision, together, with gusto. You see mutual support begin to develop and you see solidarity and collective ownership. As people work together they tune into one another. As they make commitments to one another and hold one another accountable to their commitments, mutual trust develops and they begin to experience the camaraderie of being part of a team. The team begins to develop an identity. People in the team gain a sense of belonging, they feel part of something powerful and perhaps unique. They demonstrate loyalty to the team. People motivate themselves. They enjoy their work and they have fun. There's a healthy aura as interactions are confident and convivial. Friendships form and often extend to regular social activities beyond work. People work better and achieve results because they've got momentum. Tom Demarco said: A team can become an almost unstoppable juggernaut for success. Managing these juggernaut teams is a real pleasure. You spend most of your time just getting obstacles out of their way.

Jack Vinson on the pernicious thinking behind multitasking :

If you're still doing things the old way , Jason Yip provides some useful tips on how to create the perception that everything is okay . In Peopleware , Tom Demarco referred to something similar as management with hysterical optimism .