In this guest post, Violaine Truck asks herself the question: Can a card game replace an agile maturity diagnostic? Read below to find out about her concerns dealing with clients that asked her to measure their agile maturity, and her experiences from playing the Agile Self-assessment Game.
The Scrum Alliance has published the 2015 State of Scrum Report. You can download the full report from the Scrum Alliance website.
I gave a well received keynote at the QCon Beijing conference, in which I explained why continuous improvement is essential to deliver value with agile. QCon Beijing was the largest QCon conference so far with over 1600 attendants.
2014 was a great year for me. I've helped organization to effectively deploy Agile and Lean and improve their ways of working, my first book became a bestseller and I've inspired professionals all around the world by sharing useful knowledge and experience on my blog and via InfoQ. Let's reflect on what 2014 has brought and do a futurespective to visualize the opportunities of 2015.
Organizations want to have insight in the values that Agile can bring to them. They want to know if and how Agile can help to satisfy customer needs more quickly, and what they can do to increase productivity and reduce development and operations costs. It is important to know the value that Agile can deliver and to be able to measure it. At the event Impact and Value of Agile, organized by the Agile Consortium, I presented the State of Affairs in Agile Value creation.
There are organizations which think that Agile or Scrum can be the solution to solve all IT problems that they have. Senior management has decided that their whole organization has to become agile. To realize that they demand that all existing (waterfall) processes will be replaced by Agile processes. Even if they succeed to do that (which is often not the case) they are usually not getting the expected business benefits out of Agile. Replacing processes doesn't make an organization Agile.
Veel van mijn artikelen gaan over verbeteringen om sneller de juiste producten en diensten met goede kwaliteit aan klanten te leveren. Verbeteren doe je niet door een doel te stellen. Een CMMI niveau is geen effectief verbeterdoel. Wat wel werkt is regelmatig reflecteren en met de feedback continu verbeteren in kleine stapjes. Kanban en Retrospectives zijn effectieve manieren om dat te doen.
Root Cause Analysis can be used in software development to build a shared understanding of a problem to determine the first or “root” causes. Knowing these causes helps to identify effective improvement actions to prevent similar problems in the future. You can also do Root Cause Analysis in agile to stop problems that have been bugging your team for too long.
Als een een probleem moet worden opgelost bedenkt men vaak zelf iets nieuws Leren van collega’s gebeurd te weinig. Waarom zijn nog steeds zoveel mensen bezig om het wiel opnieuw uit te vinden? Er zijn wielen zat, in alle soorten en maten, dus laten we ze (her)gebruiken om ermee te gaan rijden!
Organisaties willen de volwassenheid van hun IT of R&D software ontwikkeling verbeteren, en doen dat b.v. met het CMMI. Maar een doel stellen, "we moeten CMMI niveau 3 worden", werkt vaak niet. Het CMMI continuous met CMMI Roadmaps maakt verbetering van vakmanschap mogelijk, door medewerkers te helpen om meer capabel te worden.
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!
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.