The basic rules of Agile project management frameworks like Scrum are deceptively simple. Drawing from his experience as an Agile coach, Jeff Campbell offers in his book “Actionable Agile Tools” some lightweight practices and tools that could help you to implement successfully an Agile approach.
The “Actionable Agile Tools” is a short book offering 15 simple but powerful practices and tools that can help Agile project management teams to succeed. Most of them run around a simple idea, like having some moments during your retrospectives where people can post flowers to each other on a section on the retrospective wall to say “thank you” to a team member. The book is well written with many of the practices illustrated by some examples drawn from the author’s coaching career. I like also that the author gives credit to the people who were at the origin of the idea mentioned in the book.
I will strongly recommend this book, which can be also downloaded for free, to every people involve in an Agile project or even a software development project using a traditional approach.
Reference: Actionable Agile Tools, Jeff Campbell, 68 pages, http://leanpub.com/actionableagiletools
Quotes
The ability to continuously improve the way we work is central to all Agile teams and organisations. Most teams use Retrospectives or similar meetings, but far too often those meetings follow an unproductive pattern.
Partially done work is a tremendous source of waste in the IT industry. This partially done work usually takes the form of items that never move on your board. You know the ones, the Post-its you don’t even see anymore because they have been on the board long enough that your mental ad filter blocks them out.
Maintaining a Product Backlog can be a costly activity, and it gets more and more costly the larger the backlog becomes. Actually, the cost is not the worst part of having a large backlog, the real risk is that it will become so unruly that it won’t be used to its potential.
Never confuse visibility with transparency, information can be highly visible but if the person seeing it can’t interpret it, it’s not transparent.