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General Agile Principles:

  • Trust before collaboration
  • Promotes self-directed and self-managed teams
  • The team and not the product owner or manager should determine the stories
  • Product owner/manager controls the backlog
  • New ideas should be put in the backlog
  • Risk Management in Agile
    • Risk analysis conducted at the start of each iteration
    • Higher risk prioritised and completed first
    • Risk should ideally be addressed/mitiagted at the start of the project
  • Iteration and Review
    • Sprint Review vs Retrospective
      • Review is about deliverables and outcomes
      • Retrospective focuses on the processes
  • Team Dynamics
    • When team makes a suggestion - first assess its validity
    • Support the team in developing an ddefining project vision
    • Support the team to perform tasks, even technical tasks like quantitative analysis, through coaching, mentoring, and training (Servant Leadership)

  • Usual best practices

    • Process
      • Follow agreed-upon processes
      • Show/Deliver value
      • Communication plans alone do not ensure project success; work to identify and align performance indicators with the deliverable
    • People
      • Attend cultural sensitivity training to understand and respect cultural differences
      • Go beyond just developing an awareness of local customs
      • Something around emotional intelligence or take care of team member emotion
      • Assess team member skill and provide training, coach, mentor, collaborate, servant leadership (Agile concept)
      • Self-organization > Central management
      • Analyze the situation and develop/present a solution OR inform stakeholders (depends on the magnitude of the issue)
      • DON’T discuss team’s concerns with the functional manager
      • If a key stakeholder WILL leave the project, that’s an issue
      • Meet with new stakeholders to review documents, even if they say things are critical
    • Always Do (ALWAYS)
      • Face the challenge head-on and have private conversations
      • In Agile, encourage the team to find new ways of working to achieve higher levels of performance

  • Answering agile related questions

  • The right answer in Agile is sometimes to:
    • Support the team in coming up with their own answer
    • Allow the team to decide and evolve their roles and responsibilities
    • Support the team in developing and defining the project vision
    • Support the team to perform tasks through coaching, mentoring, and training (Servant Leadership)
  • What to Avoid (NEVER)
    • Fire or replace people
    • Request additional money or resources, suggest progressive financial rewards
    • Ask the project sponsor to deal with it (be careful of answers with sponsor in it)
    • Anything with HR
    • Anything with negative wording
    • Anything with ‘never’ or ‘always’ (unless you’re 100% sure)
    • Anything passive like ‘monitor’ if you need to avoid a risk or address an issue
    • Escalate without review/evaluate/assess
    • Make potentially unnecessary changes if everything is on track
  • Competitive environments are bad but individual rewards can be good
  • When a new project manager takes over an ongoing project, one of the first steps is to review the project's history and current status with the project sponsor

Scaled Agile framework (SAFe)

  • Comprehensive agile methodology for scaling agile practices acorss an entire organisation and not just individual projects
  • Utilises Agile Release Trains (ARTs) to deliver value consistently across teams
  • Emphasizes lean principles and value streams

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

  • Flexible, people first, learning oriented hybrid Agile approach focusing on IT solution delivery
  • Goal oriented rather than process oriented

Large scale scrum (LeSS)

  • Framework for scaling Scrum for large product development teams
  • Implements Scrum principles across multiple teams while maintaining simplicity and minimizing additional roles

PDCA

  • Plan
  • Do
  • Check
  • Act

WSJF (Weighted Shortest job first)

  • Mathematical model for prioritising takss objectively based on their wieght

Kotter model

  • 8 step change management model involving estanlishing urgency, forming a coalition, developing and communicating a vision, empowering action, creating quick wins, building on chnage and making it stick