Agile 2007 Conference (Day 2)
Here are my notes from Tuesday’s sessions.
Stimulating Success: Agile Managers as Facilitators (Diana Larsen)
- How do we (as managers) impact the team?
- Collaboration is key.
- My job isn’t to ‘do’, but to help other learn how to ‘do’.
- Read books by Mary Parker Follett
- During weekly one-on-one meeting, be sure to ask, “Do you have everything you need to do your job?”
- Create a charter for the project.
- Imagine a school that taught transformation of opposition into collaboration.
- Recruit people based on the needs of the team.
- WWIFM (What’s In It For Me) – Ask your team members, “What do you want from this job, besides a paycheck?”
Your Enterprise Systems Hinder Business Agility
- We (IT) are part of business, not a separate entity.
- Silo-based versus team-based is a big issue.
- We need to align goals, increase transparency, and improve two-way communications.
- Perform value stream mapping, to see where the bottlenecks are in our system.
- Remove queues. Get the work done right away.
- Get a formal list of operational requirements before starting development.
- Account for refactoring within you user stories.
- Make a story for documentation of deployment.
- The person initiating value stream mapping should be someone with the ability to start a change, based on the results of the mapping.
- Co-locate an operations person with the development team
- Pair a developer with an operations person during deployments, so the developer can see where that pain points are for operations.
- Use support calls to drive new user stories (through product/customer) and retrospective topics (through team lead).
- Get the books “Release It” and “Fearless Change”.