People and team member management for Agile project management and Scrum software development teams.
It is “those skeptical people” who are most annoying. They don’t seem to listen to our ideas. They usually start raising objections before we have even finished describing what we are thinking. They have a counterargument for every argument. What’s to be done with “those people”? In this presentation, Linda Rising pulls patterns from the Fearless Change collection plus the latest research in neuroscience to help you in the challenges you face with resistance.
Reducing the time to create usable software with short Scrum sprints is a nice thing, but then how do you deliver it to the users? How can Agile developers who embrace changes work with system people who like stability? To answers these questions, Scrum.org and the DevOps Institute have produced a white paper titled “The Convergence of Scrum and DevOps”.
Marc Andreessen famously said “software is eating the world”. Yet most of our software development project teams and organizations simply are not set up for us to take part in this revolution. Why? Our organizational surroundings are directly responsible for inefficient design and delivery – locally-optimized silos, opaque and ossified power structures, multi-layered middle management, command-and-control executives – the failings are well known.
The market keeps talking about cultural change, that will help us be better at what we do. We have Agile, Scrum, teal organizations, holacracy, sociocracy, NVC and all other similar concepts. But is there anything all of those organizations have in common?
T-shaped skills is a metaphor used to describe people with deep vertical skills in a specialized area as well as broader but not necessarily deep skills in other areas. This is a base for cross-functional Scrum teams, but people can resist this. Learn why and what you can do to change this.
Many people, even the people supposedly using Agile, have too much work to do. You have project work. You have support work, formal for customer support or sales, and informal for your colleagues. You have reports to write or file, time cards to fill out, or other periodic events. You know your multitasking is slowing down your work, making you crazy, and making it difficult to deliver your best work. You need a way to say no to more work.
Agile and Scrum were supposed to free us from management: self-organized, cross-functional teams who get stuff done without that old-guard hierarchy. In this fauxtopia, some software developers were more equal than others. Can we get the healthy parts back without the Lumberghs? To bring back healthy engineering management, we must first de-mystify and de-stigmatize the concept of management.
