CHOW #277: How will my manager review my performance in an Agile team?
You are the Agile coach in an organization that has embarked in its journey to adopt Agile. You have completed the initial assessment, done tailored training sessions for the teams and started coaching the leaders and teams. The Scrum teams are formed by drawing members from various domains to make it cross functional and a […]
CHOW # 276: When is ‘the looser the hold, the firmer the grip’ not valid?
In the blogpost on overmanaging leaders and needy employees, we said that one of the key strategies to avoid creating needy employees is to empower them and give them autonomy. Now, while giving autonomy to our associates, we need to set the right kind of boundaries for them to ‘autonomy’ themselves in, and also make […]
CHOW # 274: How to share bad news with your team member?
Sudha is a project manager with a Global IT services organization. She joined this company 8 years ago as a fresh software engineer, grew to a tech lead and now she is an architect. She has been a consistent performer over the years. Sudha’s company has been practicing an annual performance appraisal cycle. They use […]
CHOW #273 – Perfectionist manager
CleanEnv Corp, was building an eco system that will protect people from harmful pollution, by providing warning over personal devices like mobile phones, smart watches etc. One of the cofounders, Roger was an ace developer and was entrusted with the development of a mobile app, a prototype which will demonstrate the power of the solution. […]
CHOW #272: Transitioning to an Agile Leader
Padma works as a Project Manager in the IT division of one of the reputed retail organizations. She has always been quite ambitious and loved to take risks. She was one of the go-to Managers when it comes to taking up new and complex projects. Because of her risk appetite and her ability to execute […]
CHOW #271: Lack of planning and Agile
CHOW 271: Lack of planning – Is Agile the reason? Kavya is a new project manager in an MNC. The project was asked to run in an agile mode. As in most projects, the Backlog was not detailed and only high-level one-line requirements were available. Business leaders wanted to know what something will cost and what the […]
CHOW #270 – Shorter Term Productivity
What was your agile transformation experience of reasonably large-sized teams (50+ people)? To be specific, what are your observations of the team’s productivity in shorter-term, say 3 to 4 months? Suggested Solution: For any software development team, transitioning into agile brings in surprises, sometimes pleasant and at times not so. The teams usually focus on […]
CHOW #275: Agile HR!
This Challenge of the Week (CHOW) is related to the blog on “Doing Agile Right – Balance“. Kishore is a friend of mine and head of the people function in a young software organization based in Mumbai. He got inspired by the book Doing Agile Right referred to in the above blog and wanted to […]
CHOW #268 – Who do you support?
You are an agile coach working with a group of middle managers as part of an enterprise transformation effort. There are coaches at senior leadership level up in the hierarchy and lower in the scrum team level. Middle managers are going about the transformation effort sincerely and they are feeling stretched to meet the deadlines. […]
CHOW #266 – Can you help Aditi to Improve her Team’s Sprint Velocity?
Aditi is a Scrum Master for an Agile Team building a SaaS product which is in the Marketing Technology domain. Aditi just got off a call with her manager and he was asking her about her Team’s Sprint Velocity. He has set her a target of improving the velocity over next 3 months. Aditi was […]
