The book Economics of Software Quality provides solutions to quantify Software Quality and manage software development and maintenance. It contains data usable to build a business case to improve quality, and decide upon improvements in your organization.
IT is viewed by many people as being something technical. They have a vision of managers with lot's of plans, documents and spreadsheets, and nerds that are sitting behind their computer doing the "real work". It may be out there, but I don't see it that often. What I see are people working together to deliver software solutions that work, which help their customers in their daily work, and deliver business value to the company. Communication and collaboration are essential to make people and teams successful. So for me, soft skills really matter in IT!
A list of the success factors that helped organizations to get Scrum implemented and used, and to make a difference.
Having a "toolbox" of retrospectives helps you as a retrospective facilitator to deliver value to a team. You can plan a retrospective meeting, and think about the technique that you want to use, but be open to change it on the spot when needed.
To do small changes, or to get an improvement journey started in an organization, I use a short cycled "observe and change" approach, that consists of a couple of hours of observation with a 1 page feedback and change advice.
One technique often used in agile retrospectives is to ask questions to the Scrum team. It's a technique that is easy to learn, but the effectiveness depends on the questions that you ask to the team. Which Questions do you ask?
What do you think: Should the scrum master come from the team, or should it be (former) project managers?
I’m an Editor for Agile on InfoQ, covering news on topics like Agile Adoption, Culture, Lean, Agile in the Enterprise, Governance, Measurements, Coaching, Collaboration, Teamwork, Professionalism, Feedback, Continuous Improvement and Lean Startup. And I will also be doing interviews, book reviews, articles, and coverage of conferences.
Listening to people and understanding their reasons to resist to change has worked for me, not only with agile, but with all kinds of (process) improvement. What works for you?
How can you manage projects with the agile approach, using user stories, planning games, and a flexible scope?
What are the needs of the business and customers for process improvement? With solutions to find better ways to do process improvement!
Do you use checklists in your daily work? Or do you hate checklists? what's your experience with them?