CHOW – The Challenge of the Week
This section will highlight some of the challenges we face in our work situations – sometimes bordering on the personal aspects as well.
These are situations that may not be classified as black or white. While there could be some good practices and patterns to handle these, the actual resolution will depend on the specific context and the disposition of the person solving the challenge at that time.
Over time, with your active participation, we hope that for every situation, we can get a broader perspective of how different people have managed the situation.
- share your perspective on how the situation can be approached
- describe what has worked – and what has not, in your own experience
- pose your own related or additional challenges to hear from others
The Challenges will usually be open for two weeks before the suggestions from PM Power coaches are published.
CHOW #308: Aren’t apples and oranges the same?!
Upon reading the blog Relative Size – 4 tips, the Scrum Master (SM) of a team I am working with as coach came to me with a question: Why are you emphasizing more time invested in backlog refinement to prepare for the next sprint instead of spending a lot of time in...
CHOW #307 – Structural remedies in Agile
Agile think tanks recommend that the modern-day organization should be a cluster of empowered teams, an entity that is like an organism able to adapt itself and thrive. Alas, when agile consultants walk into a new customer engagement, chances are what they see appears...
CHOW #306 – Is my team improving?
Shashikanth is the manager of the scrum teams you are coaching for the last few months. He has been very helpful and enthusiastic about the Agile Transformation initiative. He has heard that scrum teams tend to show an increasing trend in their velocity, once they are...
CHOW #305: Sensing if you have an empowering environment
NetForYou is a product engineering organization developing networking solutions. They have been in business for more than 20 years. As the CEO of the organization, Vishwanath has taken empowerment to heart, repeatedly reinforcing it in communicating to his direct...
CHOW #304: Travails of a young coach
As agile coaches, we have all had our initial travails, cutting our teeth in the first engagement and at times learning the hard way. One can walk down memory lane, maybe with a rueful smile! Here is a quiz of three questions which may make you reminisce! For those...
CHOW # 303 Growing pains in a Scrum team
You are the new coach assigned to a software team in a multinational financial company. The team has three senior members who have more than five years experience and four members with less than 2 years of experience. The Scrum Master (SM), Marina, is a strong...
CHOW # 302 : Together but not a team
Destruction vector created by upklyak - www.freepik.com Gladiators is a well-formed Agile team as per the prevailing practices - 5 Developers, 2 testers, 1 SM and 1PO. The team delivers complex technology solutions for the Cloud platform. Each of the...
CHOW #301 – Policy and Pragmatism
EmpFirst Inc, decided to reopen their offices after Covid subsided and the government removed all related restrictions. However, many employees had settled in their new mode of working and some had also relocated to their homes elsewhere in the country. EmpFirst...
CHOW #300 – Navigating coaching practices
Photo by Conor Luddy on Unsplash You are coaching an eight-member team in Pune, part of a large multinational in the tech sector. The team is self-sufficient with the Product Owner & Product Management also being located in Pune. The team is now facing a...
CHOW #298 – Adaptive Leadership
For an adaptive leadership to succeed in a chaordic organization, one of the key factors is mutual trust. Could you please highlight top two things from your list that helps develop trusting culture in an organization? CHOW Solution: There are so many practices to be...
CHOW #297 – An Architect’s Dilemma
Mohan, senior IT architect at ABC Bank, was looking at the cloud bills for the first quarter for one of the bank’s newest payments transaction software he helped architect and design. He simply could not believe his eyes and was aghast at the high dollar figure in...
CHOW #296: Backlog Blinkers
Bill is a Product Manager in a large software product firm, which has decades of leadership in their target segment. He has over 20 years of experience at this company and has excellent relationship with the major customers of the product. John, the new CEO, had come...
CHOW #295: Splitting hair over splitting team
This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-SA-NC Priyanka is the coach for a team making firmware and software for ECUs (electronic control units) and app layers above. Due to the number of fragmented technologies in the solution and the workload, the...
Chow # 294: Four key expectations from a Scrum Master’s role
Effectiveness in playing a Scrum Master's role can significantly influence the success of a project and help in creating an environment for High Performing teams. While the specifics can cover many activities, we identify four key expectations of the...
CHOW #293: Experimentation and Research Issues
An enterprise exists to deliver value to its stakeholders. Continuous delivery of value to stakeholders is the mantra that industry leaders now chant in their offices all day long. Now, how do they deliver this continuous value? One important aspect of creating better...
CHOW #291 Low Hanging Fruits or Meaningful Wins?
Shiva is a Product Leader and leading a solution development team which is in the Automotive Technology domain. As a product leader he is sitting on huge pile of backlog of features which has been built up over sometime working with customers and internal...
CHOW # 290 – Aligning Practices to Values and Principles
Look at the following two situations – one coming from implementation of XP and one from Scrum. Situation 1 The Principle of Mutual Benefit in XP says that every activity that you do as part of software development should benefit all concerned – now and later...
CHOW #289 – Backlog Refinement or bones of contention?
Shivani is the Scrum Master of for the Palomar team. She approaches you, the Agile coach, with a situation she is facing with the Backlog Refinement. Palomar team has scheduled regular Backlog Refinement meetings for couple hours on their Fridays. These are not...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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