Agile DC Executive Summit - Teague Hopkins

People make agile seem pretty complicated when they first hear about it. There are clear successes when you implement agile if you are able to incorporate a few things. If you don't understand the underlying philosophies of scrum, you may have a harder time being successful. Listen with Bob and George Dinwiddie as they give advice and tips on how to organize your work, do it, and work as a team.

1. Organizing the work

Goes hand in hand with the body of scrum.Have a clear goal, work in iterations, don't plan too far in advance. For some, that's enough, but it might not be enough by itself to deliver regularly and reliably. Here are some tips on organizing your work:

• Break the work down into chunks to complete in short iterations.
• Measure progress by the end result's value, rather than the time spent on the work

2. Doing the work

Teams already know the work that they're doing to some degree. Sometimes they aren't doing it well, sometimes they are.

• Having deadlines might shine a light on some fundamental issues your team might have. They might be signing on for too much, not know how to test, find discrepancies in what to build, or a host of other underlying problems.
• Integrate testing into the work - don't wait until you need to deploy!
• Have "not started", "in progress", and "done" as your columns on a visual management system

3. Working as a team

A lot of companies expect to throw people into a room and exter them to magically work well together. We know that doesn't actually happen, so here are some tips to have your team work better together.

• Collaborate! Have your testers and developers talk throughout the entire sprint, instead of waiting until a testing phase to work out bugs.
• Make sure your team supports each other. Respect opinions, have dialogue instead of arguments, and adjust to the personalities in your team.
• Have ongoing organizational support. perhaps try integrating team level performance and individual level performance together

Need help implementing these tips into your own organizations? Give us a shout at lithespeed.com or reach out at [email protected]