Articles on Scrum and Agile Project Management
Holacracy defines itself as “a customizable self-management practice for organizations”. This idea is not very far from the self-organization approach of Scrum, but it proposes a different framework to deal with issues. In her article “Decentralising Leadership: Holacracy in Practice”, Sandy Mamoli shared the story of implementing Holacracy in an Agile organization.
Sometimes as software developers we think that if we build a good product, the users will like it. It is not however not always so easy and you have to communicate well about it, especially if you follow an Agile approach and are looking for instant and valuable feedback from your demo. In this article, Esena Gusic shares some of the tricks she uses as a product owner when delivering a product demo during the Scrum sprint review.
One of the key benefit for organizations that adopt an Agile project management framework like Scrum should be the shortened value delivery cycle. Providing a quicker feedback, this should lead to continuous improvement the development process. This is however not always the case. In this article, Ronit Eliav discusses six issues that can cause static Agile.
The concept of team is at the heart of Agile software development and frameworks like Scrum. Forming high performance Agile teams is however not obvious. In this article, Debbie Madden suggests five steps that could bring your software development teams beyond the basic principles of Agile.
Some software development teams try to adopt Scrum, but they don’t achieve the full benefits of this approach. This might be due to the fact that the teams customize Scrum in a way that is inappropriate. In this article, Pablo Pecora suggests five aspects of Scrum, like the planning poker, that you cannot skip if you want to get the benefits of Agile.
Agile is about giving responsibility to the people, and self-organization is one of the way this is achieved. Agile is also about continuous improvement and adaptation. To follow this journey, the Scrum teams need to assess how they are doing and where they should improve. In this article, Ben Linders discusses Agile self-assessments and how they can support the continuous improvement process to an Agile mindset.
If some consider Scrum as an Agile project management framework, many people consider that is is more a product management approach. Anyway, Scrum is about understanding the need of the customers to deliver value. In this context, the concept of “personas” can be used to support user-centered design throughout a product development cycle by focusing on the characteristics of key user segments.