Agile Project & Portfolio Management

Agile Project & Portfolio Management, Leadership and more.

Worthy Reads #6

Creating and Sticking To Working Agreements

Working_agreements
When first starting out with agile, it is important to establish "working agreements." Working agreements are team norms, expected behaviors. Before you start your first iteration, I recommend sitting down with the team and brainstorming a few simple agreements.

Here are some examples:

  • Electronics by exception - nothing is more frustraing than being in a meeting and people are either on their laptops or phones and not focusing on the matter at hand. Some people are on-call or might be expecting a call. No worries, ask for an exception. Be present, be focused. 
  • Meeting times - meetings should take place the same time at the same cadence. For example, daily stand-ups will start at 10am, every work day, in the same location
  • Respect each others time

I do not want to confuse working agreements with creating a definition of Done (DoD). Creating a definition of done is its own exercise. A post for another day. If you are looking for some help on creating a definition of done, Rally has good resources on creating DoD at multiple planning levels.

Once these working agreements are established, I recommend a few tactics for keeping them top of mind with your team.

1. Make it visible - use a flip-chart and post in your team room or where people work. If you do not have this, bring the flip chart to meetings. The point being, if the team visually sees the agreements, they will be more inclined to remember them. 

2. Inspect and adapt -  At the start of every planning meeting or retrospective, ask the team if any updates need to be made to the working agreements.

3. Pull your learnings forward - After the retrospective, determine if any of the experiments the team will be conducting during the upcoming iteration should be added to the working agreements, this keeps the experiment top of mind/more visible to the entire team.

These are just a few ideas, what has worked on your teams? 

 

 

Relaunching Focus of Site

I love Posterous, I think it is a great service. As my social media consumption has broadened throughout the years, I have various personas. Facebook is for personal use, LinkedIn for business. For Twitter, I have use a business account and and personal account. I also use Instagram, Pinterest, Foursquare and Tumblr. 

Posterous use to be my catch all, but I find I am posting less and less here (my last post was in October 2011). So I decided to make a change (not that anyone will notice for I do not have a lot of people following). Going forward, I am going to focus this blog on my professional expertise, Agile Project & Portfolio Management. 

My personal, catch all blog I will use my Tumblog, In Like Flynn. In Like Flynn is kind of like my mind... randon posts on technology, photography, music and style. Check it out and follow me there. 

I know there are a lot of Agile blogs out there, I used to blog quite frequently about the subject. I hope to add some value to community. When talking with folks, they struggle with a lot of problems that we at ShopLocal have figured out over the years. I hope to share my thoughts on managing a portfolio of projects and people in a successful software company. I will also be posting articles on leadership, software development, technology and retail trends. 

Regards, 

Brendan

Worthy Reads #4

Here are a few articles that I have read or plan to read over the weekend: 

Worthy Reads #1

Here are some good articles and presentations on the Role of the Agile Manager