Agile Buddha

Demystifying Agile, Getting to its Core

Overcoming Cultural Differences in Distributed Agile Teams – A Case Study

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Overcoming Cultural Differences

Recently I had a discussion with one of my dutch friends who has a company based in India. He mentioned that sometimes it gets very difficult to understand and handle cultural issues with his Indian colleagues. Issues which he mentioned are not new and people from western countries interacting Indian teams must be very well aware of what I’ll mention here. Some examples:

  • One person speaking on behalf of the entire team and other people either keep silent or just reply in terms of yes and no
  • Always saying yes to everything even though even customer may already be aware that the task may be difficult to achieve.

As you investigate further, these instances are very common in the team coming from hierarchy centric cultures where only senior and so-called senior people have a say, while the rest just follow what’s asked them to do.
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If You Need Kanban in Scrum, You’re Probably Doing it All Wrong!!!

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Rugby Scrum

The original idea of Scrum came from a 1986 HBR article “The New New Product Development Game“, written by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka. The teams at Honda and elsewhere reminded Takeuchi and Nonaka of the game of rugby and they called this style of project management “Scrum,” a short form of the term “scrummage” where the game is restarted when the ball has gone out of play.

So what’s so significant about rugby scrum?

In rugby scrum, the ball gets passed within the team as it moves as a unit up the field.

Scrum is all about everyone doing everything all the time. It’s an important point to remember as otherwise, Scrum becomes yet another framework with 5 events, 3 roles, and 3 artifacts.

The foundation of Scrum encourages one-piece continuous flow.

So in a Collaborative Daily Scrum, instead of answering 3 daily Scrum questions, a team looks at the Scrum board and plans on how to swarm or mob to finish the top PBI (Product Backlog Item) on the board.

It may happen, depending upon the tasks identified for a PBI, 3-4 people decide to swarm and finish it. And then the rest of the team picks the next PBI.

Daily Scrum is a sprint planning in small. You replan the sprint every day.

If a team is working like this, there should be couple of stories (depending upon size) in progress at any point in time.

So you see, if a team decides to swarm or mob, one doesn’t require to set explicit WIP limits anymore. The disciplinary act of stopping at numerical WIP limits is not required as that becomes part of the system.

The team focuses on finishing existing PBIs before picking anything new.

As we discuss the key idea of collaboration (swarming or mobbing) here, it’s important to understand that the idea of “swim-lane Scrum” (each team member individually taking ownership of a PBI through the stages of the process) doesn’t really work. It blocks the delivery pipeline as any PBI a tester may work on comes after a few days, a week or so.

At that point in time, a tester may get multiple stories to test at once and may become the bottleneck. That kind of scenario is not the ideal state of flow but is more like a Scrumfall in which work arrives in a batch after a period of time.

Kanban Mythbusters Series

There are other posts on Kanban Mythbusters series which you may find interesting

References

 

Agile : The Dilemma of IT Service Organizations

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I spent a big amount of my IT journey in working with IT Service organizations which Product organizations call as vendors.

While product organizations can decide how exactly they would want to work, teams from service organizations are mere extension from a customer enterprise IT strategy standpoint. Whether to work in Agile or not, Agile or AgileBut, all that is driven by the customer. If customer continues to work in Waterfall, you may not use Agile in isolation.

For service organizations, money comes from the headcount and the billing rate. As long as that’s improving while keeping the status quo, sometimes management may not see any specific value add in focusing on things which are not burning. That includes innovation, adopting Agile, TDD or focus on long term quality.

In short, customer drives the show. If customer is quality conscious, vendor follows the suit. Otherwise maybe not.

Service organizations play the software development service provider role in the enterprise development value stream. They focus on optimizing what they essentially work upon from Agile and DevOps standpoint which translates to improvising technical practices, automation and some DevOps technical practices.

While doing so, the trouble is – they don’t get the awareness of the whole, the whole enterprise landscape. That perspective is important for enterprises implicitly but not necessarily out of question for service organizations. It’s not easy to get such awareness. That’s the reason it becomes easy to miss.

In some Indian Agile conferences, where audience are majorly from service organizations, sometimes, people find anything beyond their technical scope as less useful. There, it seems like, automation and DevOps technical practices are the panacea of software development world. These practices are easy to talk about, difficult to implement and are definitely not the low hanging fruit for any enterprise.

There may be many other low hanging fruits which bring a lot of value add and reduces the cycle time without spending a lot of time, money and resources.

I understand the dilemma, however without understanding the whole or the big elephant, it becomes difficult to provide the real value add to the customer.

Good people in such orgs who really want to work in Agile environment find themselves helpless unless that’s the part of customer IT strategy. Employees may then get frustrated because of lack of opportunities.

What if service organizations are ahead of the curve and help customers in looking ahead? That requires spending on innovation and research which not many orgs do as of now. But you see, the focus on innovation has become important for survival these days.

Waterfall to Agile : Experiences from Trenches

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Image credit – https://vitalitychicago.com via https://i1.wp.com/vitalitychicago.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/how-to-successfully-transition-from-waterfall-to-scum_methodology.jpg?w=1024&ssl=1

There have been a lot of agile success stories but mostly are around project challenges and how teams overcame them. In those high level details, the experiences from the trenches get hidden or get overlooked.

There are still many projects and people, who are transitioning from waterfall to Agile. It’s interesting for such people to hear the experiences from similar people (who moved waterfall to Agile) around their role, i.e. how for a developer role things got changed and similarly for tester/BA/Scrum Master roles as well.

This post is based on the real interviews of team members of such a project in a large enterprise. The team members shared their perspectives around their role. For everyone in the team, this was their first ever Agile project.

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