AGILE COACHING
I’ve been an agile practitioner for 15 years, specializing in both Scrum and Kanban. I’ve had the privilege of working with many great teams in many different environments. I’ve even been featured on the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast with Vasco Duarte, author of #NoEstimates - a book that has had an enormously positive impact on my work. These experiences provided me with the opportunity to try new things and apply different approaches that honed my skills & refined the systems and processes I use today.
Tools & Practices
The systems and processes I use better enable agile teams to succeed at delivering high-value, high-quality products for their stakeholders. Some of these systems & processes include:
Retrospectives that actually encourage positive change. I encourage teams to ask "why" something happened using the 5 "whys" method to get to the root of the problem and solve from there. We then work to prioritize & focus on one problem at a time. We try out a new solution, experiment and use empirical data to assess how it worked. Then we make incremental adjustments to the solution as necessary.
Quality front and center. I favor collaboration with key stakeholders on a consistent and iterative basis to define acceptance criteria. Teams would ideally do this at the start of each sprint or iteration during planning. This ensures everyone is on the same page as to what the definition of success for each feature looks like.
Requirements definition as a team effort - avoiding silos. I encourage representatives from each discipline to be present at requirements definition and refinement. Each discipline has a unique voice and focus to offer that directly impacts the other. When Design, Quality, and Development all provide input it dramatically increases the team's understanding of feature goals, priorities, trade-offs, and risks.
Backlog grooming practices that reduce waste and provide team and stakeholder transparency. I've found that consistent, iterative reviews of upcoming work with product owners or key stakeholders help to further refine requirements, and strategically eliminate old, stale stories that no longer serve the organization.
A faster, more efficient way to track progress. I focus on forecasting progress based on actual data versus attempting to precisely estimate effort. Volumes of research and statics prove estimates are nearly always wrong. Using the actual number of stories completed each iteration (the team's throughput) as a measure of future progress provides a more concrete way to forecast delivery timelines.
These are a few of my top "agile best practices" that I bring to the table when working with any product implementation team.