Preparation begun, reading Chapter 1 of Succeeding with Agile
In preparation for the Scrum Alliance, Scrum Master Course I am reading and working through Mike Cohn’s book Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum (yes this is an affiliate link, supporting good content).
I have just completed the first chapter of the book. The first describes the difficulty of introducing scrum in to the work place, and it also discusses the benefits it can bring. It is hard to introduce scrum because people are often resistant to change. However the change can be really beneficial for the working environment, in terms of productivity and jobs satisfaction.
During the first chapter and throughout the book Mike Cohn adds short sections called “Things try now”, these are practical tasks to do in the journey of succeeding with agile.
The first thing to do is: To identify your familiarity with agile methodology, and to work out what are the obstacles in integrating scrum methods to the team you work with.
Agile methodology is not new to me. I have studied it at university and wrote two articles about it on another blog: introduction to agile software development , and creating an agile project plan.
These are some of the obstacles I believe I will face, and will overcome:
- Convince the management of the company I work for that using the agile methodologies is a good thing to do.
- Persuade my colleagues that using the agile methodologies is a good thing to do.
- Pass the understanding to everyone in the company, that a software team cannot operate in an agile way, unless the entire company does, from top to bottom. This does not necessarily mean every department has a scrum every morning, but they should all be aware of the release cycles of software.
- Find away to quantify the success of scrums and other agile methods, one they have been introduced.
The second thing to try is: To gather metrics on things like employee morale, stake holder satisfaction, and time to deliver new features or versions of the product. To be able to build an understanding of the improvements, if any, scrum has brought to the company. Then in three and six months time, gather those measurements again, to work out was adding scrum worth it?
This means I need to decide on metrics to measure, however at the moment, I am not sure what they should be. I will discuss this with my colleagues and work out together what they should be.
In the meantime if you have any suggestions I will be really interested to read them, so please leave a comment, or send me a tweet @farbey!
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