Leadership

What’s the easiest way to screw up a Scrum or agile adoption at a company? Simple. Tell people “we’re agile”, give them a one-hour overview of how things work, and then let them loose. This post discussed my first agile project, and the five steps I’ve implemented at mulitple companies to ensure a successful Scrum transformation.

We’ve all heard the common myth, Agile means no documentation. While other agile fallacies exist, this is a big one, and it could not be farther from the truth. Good agile teams are disciplined about their documentation but are also deliberate about how much they do and when.

In the world of Scrum it’s fairly common for organizations to quickly jump into practicing the agile methodology and then become frustrated or disappointed when they don’t see significant immediate results.

The true measure of project progress is working software - or is it? Recording from Microsoft TechEd Europe 2010, Berlin Germany

People often ask why they should work on a Scrum team if their companies base rewards on individual efforts. This raises the question, how does Scrum help the individual?

I am always amazed when I ask people what they think the job of a manager is. I get answers like “to tell people what to do” to “stay out of the way” to “do my performance review” to “lead”. The last one is always of interest to me. Do companies hire managers or do they hire leaders?

Mixing Scrum and Waterfall will provide you an interesting mix… This is one of my older MSDN posts from August, 2006. Enjoy. :)