CHOW#288 – Restoring Work-Life Balance
Suvarna is the leader of a support team that supports a enterprise software for project management. Working hours for her team are from 9:00 am to 11:00 pm as they support customers in India and UK. While most of her team members work from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm which are Indian office hours, some […]
CHOW#287 – The Drama of “Unplanned Leaves”
Piyush works as a Manager for a team of 20 people. He has been successfully running an IT team for the last 3 years. However, he has been constantly plagued by his people going on unplanned leaves. This has been happening for the last 8-9 months or so. It also came out in several retrospectives. […]
CHOW #286 – A clash of journeys
Asin is a bright fresh recruit in the mid-sized organization that you lead as the CEO. She wanted to specialize in cyber security. Asin had joined with tremendous anticipation. She had picked your organization in preference to two other big names during the campus placement. Prior to deciding, she had actually visited your office and […]
CHOW #285 – Unwilling developer
Bill is a Product Manager in a large software product firm with their development centre in India. He felt that the developers do not understand the customer’s business context enough. He spoke to Ram, Engineering Head in India, and sought volunteers to join the two-day user group conference in China. To his surprise, Ram came […]
CHOW #284 – Five “out-of-scope” questions
Photo by Chaitanya Tvs on Unsplash This Challenge of the Week (CHOW) reminds me of student days and the outrage at “out-of-syllabus” questions in exams! Here are a few on agile scope management for you to try out (within syllabus but some googlies!!). As a short prep, you may want to refresh yourselves on agile […]
Chow # 283 – Objective or Key Result
One of the frequently asked questions I get from teams starting out to adopt the OKR framework – Objectives and Key results, is how to distinguish between an objective and a Key result. Additionally, how do we word these – so that there is less or no ambiguity. While a detailed treatment of OKRs would […]
CHOW #281 – Customer does not want continuous delivery
Mike is a highly experienced product manager in E-CRM, large enterprise software organization. E-CRM has been successful over the last 15 years in selling their enterprise grade CRM solution to businesses primarily in their premises. E-CRM’s leadership has launched an initiative to re-position E-CRM as a Cloud Solution and is promoting continuous delivery in a […]
CHOW #280 – What does Lean mean to you?
Photo by Jack B on Unsplash This Challenge of the Week (CHOW) is a quiz on Lean and how Agile and Scrum have drawn from it and adapted. Try out these five multiple choice questions. Enjoy!
CHOW #279 – When Customer doesn’t accept releases on Cadence ?
Last week, Eashwar called me and said he wanted to meet me urgently on a critical issue. He said on phone. “Everything we had planned as part of an Agile Transformation is crumbling fast and our customer is not accepting frequent releases. What should I do now?” I asked him to calm down. We set […]
CHOW# 278 – Agile estimation – some chronic questions
Here are three most often asked questions / challenges organizations face (in estimation and related aspects) when they go through a major transformation to Agile. How would you address them / approach the challenges? We have implemented relative sizing approaches at a team level. Since it is largely driven by individual teams, how do I […]
