Category: process improvement

Scrum, the experimentation framework

December 19, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

Due to its exterior simplicity lately Scrum has become the most popular Agile method. What can be simpler, than few artifacts roles and procedure? The unfortunate consequence of this exterior simplicity is that often people try adopting the method without a deep thought and proper guidance. Some coaches consider it so big problem, that declare the fall of agile (I don’t think so).

One of the particularly interesting aspects that is missing from the simple method description is that Scrum is a powerful experimentation framework. The cadence of short iterations and mandatory reflection moments allows a team to try significant amount of improvements in a rather short period of time. You think making acceptance tests a mandatory part of all the requirements is useful? – Try it for a sprint or two and see if it works for you. Arguments about the effectiveness and social aspects of pair programming and colocation seem to be going forever? – Move the tables together and try pairing for a sprint. Some practices such as Test Driven Development might need some more time for a real try, but even in these cases them it is usually possible to figure out the required experiment length in advance. Scrum applied with a decent amount of rigor forces participants to focus on the goals and evaluation criteria of the potential improvements and arms the team with the regularly applied improvement cycle.

The Fruits of Pain

July 15, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

I recently blogged about a little personal disaster that resulted in 100 gigabytes of data being wiped out from both my hard disk and my backup disk. Fortunately, I was able to recover most of the important data that I lost. And despite the panic of the moment I can say that I might even be better off now.

The situation after the catastrophe is better than the one before.

Reconstructing my data folders required me to rethink the folder hierarchy, to clean up old junk I never used, to improve file and folder naming, and to clearly separate vital data from convenient data. Before the crash my data storage situation was a bit messy. It wasn't bad, but it just wasn't good either. But after the catastrophe I spent a lot of time creating a situation that is now much better than before. So, why didn't I do all of that earlier? It would have saved me a lot of trouble.

Agile Process Improvement, the Hardest Part

June 5, 2008 by JurgenAppelo

In our company I am responsible for most of our process improvement activities. It's not that I can do everything myself. But I must make sure that there are plenty of initiatives, that they don't bite each other, and that they are moving the organization into the direction that I desire.

Some examples: new templates for standard documents, improving our testing methods, introducing new intranet and project environments, reorganizing teams into cross-functional ones, reorganizing job descriptions and levels, creating new training materials, coupling invoicing to time registration, improving the project estimation procedure, improving the recruitment process, etc...

Basically, my process improvement efforts come down to this:

1. People complain to me about things going wrong, and they request a solution.
2. I add the issue to my backlog, which has the size of an average glacier (and moves forward with roughly the same speed).
3. I plan my work on these issues iteratively, at the beginning of each month.
4. I do not allow new requests during the month. All new requests are saved for (re)planning and (re)prioritization at the start of the next month.
5. The biggest challenge is actually trying to do the things that I planned during a month.
6. At the end of the month I check which issues I was able to solve (usually very few) and I act accordingly (often by moving many issues to the following month).
7. We regularly review our process improvement initiatives in our management team. And, believe it or not, I still haven't been kicked out.