by Shiv Sivaguru | Oct 9, 2017 | Agile
One of the most frequently asked questions is ‘what are the right metrics for an Agile project?’ My response usually is something like this: Borrowing from a popular quote from George Box, the famous statistician, ‘All models are wrong. But, some are...
by Shiv Sivaguru | Sep 25, 2017 | Chow
Babu appeared irritated. He was the project manager in a large Systems Integrator, who had successfully grown a new relationship – that started as a 4 person project, to a 50 person team. His approach had been to work closely with his customers, anticipate their needs...
by Shiv Sivaguru | Jun 24, 2017 | Digital Transformation
The most commonly accepted definition of DevOps is that it is a movement. There are many discussions around the approaches that would work best to adopt DevOps in a specific context. Most of these threads talk about the need for culture, automation, lean thinking etc,...
by Shiv Sivaguru | Jun 23, 2017 | Chow
Sunita looked anxious when she met me a couple of months ago. She has been a successful Scrum Master and enjoyed her work. Her team respected her and held her in high regard. She also had a good working relationship with the Product Management team and the...
by Shiv Sivaguru | Jun 23, 2017 | Digital Transformation
It is always good to learn from others, particularly if the sources are from across industries – as they trigger ideas to apply in our own work areas. While this is one such learning from the IT industry, The latest State of DevOps report for 2017 offers...
by Shiv Sivaguru | Apr 12, 2017 | Agile
One of the areas that I have seen Agile teams having difficulty is in maintaining a healthy backlog. The impact of not having a good backlog impacts many activities for teams. Starting with ambiguity in terms of release planning – or planning ahead and...
by Shiv Sivaguru | Apr 12, 2017 | Chow
Vivian was the Scrum master for team Condor, that was responsible for managing and enhancing the customer insights platform for an FMCG major. The newly formed ‘Digital Surround’ team under marketing was their main user department. They had very ambitious plans to...
by Shiv Sivaguru | Jan 28, 2017 | Digital Transformation
Over the many years of my interactions with various projects, the most common misconception that I come across is equating a daily standup to scrum and agile. In such situations, the conversations invariably start something like this: “We are already agile, we do...
by Shiv Sivaguru | Oct 2, 2016 | Chow
Dinesh was confused. As a project manager, he was not sure how to respond to the question from the finance team on a proposal to buy a new tool for this project. The suggestion for the tool had come from his team. A tool that would reduce the efforts being spent today...
by Shiv Sivaguru | Oct 2, 2016 | Business Agility
Teams and organizations like things to be deterministic. Start with a plan – a projection – and make sure you achieve the goals. Based on oft quoted phrase ‘you cannot manage what you cannot measure’, the next step is to make everything measurable. The goals in terms...
