Let’s Meetup and discuss techniques and strategies for Agile team building II

You do NOT need to have made part I for this to be relevant to you! 🙂 We gathered so many insights that we decided to break them down and create action item/ solutions THIS session.
The insights are listed below. Please review and think of which ones are best for brainstorming action items. I’ll have them all up again and an opportunity to add to it and then we’ll dot vote and the 2-3 that get the most votes we’ll discuss. Here are the insights that are up for discussion;

Not Working

• Team fears stakeholders reaction at Sprint review

• Lack of Product Owners

• Project Management too much work in progress

• Every thing is CAP-EX No OP-EX

• Everyone owns quality

• Overcoming “Scrumerfall”

• Communication goes dead, people don’t like to talk about problems

• Some individuals may have burn out as evidenced by low attendance at meeting = lost motivation

• Project was not profitable last year therefore long term sustainability in question

• Project budgeting and scheduling

• Speed of administrative steps/ processes

• Trying to keep waterfall project’stage gate’ structure with Agile project (check out https://www.stage-gate.com/resources_stage-gate_agile.php)

• Managing resources and priorities

• Executive Stakeholders Mindsets (not creative, outside the box, already has solution in their head)

• No business or customer requirement

Kinda Working

• Trust from management on team’s expertise to come up with best solutions

• Cross team retrospective sessions (e.g., after a major release /project)

• Too much bad tech debt, starting to pay some off

• Dev ops/ Build automation

• Team learning not to follow PO but to collaborate

• Implementation of Agile practices and principles

• We have a great team meeting with new ideas but then everything stays the same

• Weekly status meeting

RecruitWise is graciously providing pizza and beverages at 6:30. Feel free to bring your own drink if you don’t want soda.

Let’s Meetup Open Source Style

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Special thanks to Arash for facilitating this meeting 🙂 The goal is to continue to have people in the group share in the presenting, so please always feel free to share your ideas to make this is team effort!

Here are the notes from the Open Source Meetup on Monday, Sept. 26th.

Topic #1: How do you bring Agile concepts into other departments of business/ non software areas
1. Add a retro to get meaningful feedback and then use it to create action items and make things better/ maximize what is going well.
2. Daily Stand Up – determine the best way to do it for your team/business.
3. Take goals and break them into milestones/ smaller pieces so that they can more easily fit into sprints.
4. Use Kanban – take your list of things and put them into a Kanban board to show the status –
not started, ready, in progress, done.
5. Look for bottlenecks in the process and remove them.
6. Take a goal and break it down in planning so that it can be done.

Topic #2: How long should Backlog Grooming/ Planning Meeting be?
1. Think refinement to help narrow the scope of the goal of the meeting – complexity, details, scope – work with Product Owner and team.
2. Observe the team during meeting and cut it off when they appear close to pulling the F#$@ It Switch.
3. Estimate in buckets of size rather than a set number, think range – it might not be a 13 but if it won’t fit in the 8 bucket without overflowing then go with 13.
4. Scrum Master may need to be liaison between technical and non-technical.
5. Scrum Master may need to do coaching with Product Owner, team, and management.

Stay tuned for a survey and update on the October Meetup.