Articles, Blog Posts, Books and Quotes on Agile Project Management
“OKRs” is the acronym of “Objectives and Key Results.” This is a collaborative goal-setting tool used by teams and individuals to set goals with measurable results. In his book “Succeeding with OKRs in Agile”, Allan Kelly explains why he considers that “OKRs have the potential to reawaken the early ambition and drive inherent in agile. This time managers can join in too, not as obstacles to change, or change drivers, but as partners focused on the same outcomes for a greater purpose.”
Delivering business value is certainly a major goal when you adopt an Agile approach like Scrum. If determining business value is already difficult inside an organization, the topic is even more complex when the project is performed by an external Agile provider. This article lists some of the important questions that should be answered about delivering value when you are contracting Agile projects to a consulting company.
There is plenty to fret about when you are running or on an agile team, but your measure of estimation should be one of them. In fact, despite what you may have heard from consultants or others, Scrum is not prescriptive about any particular estimation measure, let alone story points. Many practitioners support story points and it has been very in vogue for a while now, you should do whatever you and your team feels most comfortable with.
At the beginning of Agile, there was a tendency to aim at “pure” Agile, following the Scrum rules by the book. Even if there might be still Scrum cargo cult implementations, many Agilists have realized that Agile is more about continuous improvement and value delivery in a specific context than staying stand-up in daily status meetings. In this article, Mark Haynes discusses the Scrumban approach that borrows tools from both Scrum and Lean Kanban.
“Responding to change over following a plan” is one of the value of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. The COVID-19 pandemic is certainly a disruptive event that caused a lot of changes in the way organisations work. In this article, Hannah Price shares her view on how many employees embraced the concept of agile without even realising it.
I recently posted a quote from a conference saying that “Removing hierarchy and cross-team dependencies made space for strong collaborative teams.” Interestingly, I got many comments and questions about it. So let’s talk about hierarchy and why we don’t need it in Agile space.
If today many people equal Agile with Scrum, the Agile approach is also deeply rooted in software engineering practices, like pair programming or refactoring, promoted by the eXtreme Programming (XP) movement. In this book, Emily Bache presents the Samman Technical Coaching approach. It is a method for helping software development teams to become more agile and raise the quality of their work.
