at release planning as a strawman and presented it to the team. “Can you do this? What do you think?”
Iteration planning: The team does iteration planning together, making sure every story is either small, medium, or large, where a large story can be done by the entire team in fewer than three days. The team makes sure they get every started story to done at the end of the iteration.
Daily commitment: The team does a daily checkin, not a standup. They timebox the checkin to 15 minutes. They ask these questions:
- What did you complete and with whom yesterday? (reinforces the idea that people work together)
- What are you working on and with whom today?
- What are your impediments?
The project manager who acts as a servant leader, not a command/controller manages the impediments.
The pilot project has two experienced agile people: the project manager and a developer. Both act as servant leaders.
Measurements: burnup charts, impediment charts
The pilot team has been together for six months now, and is successful. This is not Scrum. It’s not Kanban. It’s agile and it’s working. They are ready to start another project team, working by attraction.
(Want to learn to work more effectively on your geographically distributed team? Join Shane Hastie and me in a workshop April 17-18, 2012.)
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About the author
Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” helps organizational leaders see problems and risks in their product development. She helps them recognize potential “gotchas,” seize opportunities, and remove impediments. Johanna was the Agile 2009 conference chair. She is the technical editor for Agile Connection and the author of these books:
- Manage Your Job Search
- Hiring Geeks That Fit
- Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects
- The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
- Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management
- Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People
Johanna is working on a book about agile program management. She writes columns for Stickyminds.com and projectmanagementcom and blogs on her website, jrothman.com, as well on createadaptablelife.com.
