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 #282 – An SMB’s Transformation
Mahesh is the CEO of a mid-sized firm in business for several decades in the construction industry, managing to carve for his firm a unique position in certain parts of the value chain. In many ways the firm is a typical SMB (Small and Midsize Business) – relying on...
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...
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! [h5p...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
CHOW #269 – Finance and Value, a short quiz!
Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash Hope you read my recent blog on Finding Value. Talking about value in the world of Finance, many of us would have followed with interest the recent development of the US financial markets introducing ETF’s with bitcoin futures as the...
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...
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...
CHOW #266 – Can you help Aditi to Improve her Team’s Sprint Velocity?
Image Courtesy: Maico Amorim from Unsplash.com 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...
Chow # 265 – Which functional organization should a Product Owner be from?
Commutronix is a highly watched startup, starting to disrupt the electric vehicle technology space. Commutronix does not manufacture vehicles. Rather they almost dominate the EV space by providing core technologies to OEMs and almost all EV manufacturers have...
Chow #264 – Room for further Improvement
If you want to further improve the throughput of the Rust quicksort implementation, what are the options you may consider? Answer Concurrency may not be an option since the sorting logic is non-blocking. One of the options is parallelism. We can leverage the number of...
CHOW #263 – Should we add a buffer to estimates? When?
Pratik is a new member in a Scrum team; he has come from another organization which had adopted Agile much before the current one. As a new member he is having a 1:1 catch up with all the other team members, this is to get familiar with the team, in these WFH times....
CHOW #262 – To stand-up or not?
Marshall Communications Inc. was a large telecom services provider and has a 35% market share in this business. However, they are threatened by their nearest competitors who have narrowed the gap between them and Marshall during the last few years by going aggressive...
CHOW#268 : Grandma’s TV remote
While attempting this CHOW, you could also take a look at a related blog “Digital Divide – By zero?!”. My grandma is in her 80’s and lives by herself in Chennai. She is quite sharp and also strong-willed; loves Chennai and her circle of friends in Mylapore. I am...
CHOW #261: How to bridge cultural differences in a multinational team?
Sid is a newly hired development manager for a global software product company. Sid is originally from India, but he has been living in the US for over five years.Sid is responsible for managing a multi-location team of teams, who are developing one of the flagship...
CHOW 260: PO overpowering SM
Murugan joined an organization as a Scrum master. One of the teams that he was asked to coach has been in running mode at a fast pace for 2 months already. The team has been doing basic agile practices such as having a time-boxed work commitment, daily standup, and...
CHOW #259 – Accommodating the change
Prakash works as a Product Owner in a software services company which specializes in custom software development for its customer. Prakash has MBA degree in Finance and has good understanding of banking and insurance domains. In his current assignment his customer is...
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