by Anantha Natarajan | Jun 24, 2019 | Mindfulness
All through my career, I have seen how emotions can work wonders but also cause turmoil in the mind. I am not excluded from that internal battle. As I was reflecting on my career, I realized a few such moments are stuck in my mind. There may not be much for the...
by Anantha Natarajan | Jun 12, 2019 | Chow
Mancini is a Product Owner. Based on the average velocity of the previous release (13 units of work), he estimated a new release of the product to take 7 Sprints. Development is 3 Sprints underway. Product Backlog has been stable. Over these first Sprints, the...
by Anantha Natarajan | Apr 17, 2019 | Chow
Agilators is a team using Scrum for about six months now and Alan is the Scrum Master of the team. Alan has some experience as an SM for a little over a year. He has been able to coach the team to adopt the ceremonies quite well but few challenges which he finds...
by Anantha Natarajan | Apr 17, 2019 | Agile
Agile has twelve Principles and the tenth one I find as probably the most profound. I have seen many teams struggling to understand this Principle. This Principle has some very generic words and some words which suggest certain aspects. First of all it states ‘work’...
by Anantha Natarajan | Feb 18, 2019 | Chow
Ram, a Test Lead, had been working for eTravel for the last three years. eTravel has a cloud-based product for frequent business travellers. When his organization decided to adopt agile practices two years ago, he chose to take on the Scrum Master role. The feature...
by Anantha Natarajan | Jan 28, 2019 | Agile, Chow
Sharma is a metrics-oriented Head of an IT function. Prior to adopting agile, his organization used Function Point (FP) method for measuring software size. Along with the effort data entered by individuals, teams measured productivity factor as FP per person day of...
by Anantha Natarajan | Jan 28, 2019 | Project Management
Productivity measurement in IT function has been debated and demanded over decades. Having made multiple attempts at solving this puzzle over many years, I have developed a point of view on productivity measurement. You may or may not agree but here it goes. To...
by Anantha Natarajan | Sep 25, 2018 | Chow
You joined this team couple of months back. You notice that your manager generally works very long hours on week-days and comes to work on certain week-ends too. You are concerned that you would not get good appraisal if you do not work similar hours. Exercise: Would...
by Anantha Natarajan | Sep 25, 2018 | Leadership, Personal Growth
Adolf Hitler would feature in most lists of leaders of all time, but I would not want to fashion my leadership journey around him, would you? The intent of this post is not to identify the right leader to emulate but define a few guiding lights. Based on my experience...
by Anantha Natarajan | Jun 4, 2018 | Agile, Chow
You are a program manager with an IT Service Provider handling a project for a U.S. based client. The client uses three different telecom service providers and pays large bills every month – for a few hundred thousand calls that cost them millions of dollars. Your...
