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Personal Agility for More Potent Agile Adoption

In this article, the authors propose that the most effective teams—those that show a tremendous improvement in productivity and value to their organizations—have individual team members who take ownership, act responsibly, and are disciplined in recognizing and responding to change at a personal level.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
How to Be Persuasive

Successfully persuading others to adopt your point of view is a matter of neither magic nor luck. It's a skill and like any skill, improvement takes know—how, opportunity, and practice. In this column, Naomi Karten offers pointers to help you strengthen your persuasion skills.

Naomi Karten's picture Naomi Karten
Lean Anti-Patterns and What to Do About Them

When attempting to adopt best practices we often can't see the forest for the trees. We can see what we are doing wrong, but how will that help us to see what to do right? In this article, we will discuss a few common Lean Anti-Patterns. Anti-Patterns are commonly recurring practices that are counter productive. We call them "Anti-Patterns" because these anti-patterns result from violating Lean principles. Lean principles form the basis for Scrum practices. Looking at how Lean Anti-Patterns violate lean principles gives us insight into how we need to modify our practices to be more effective.

Al Shalloway's picture Al Shalloway
People-Driven Software Development

Traditionally, we think about projects is in termsof scope, time, cost, quality, human resources, communication, and risk. Thisway of thinking mainly originated in industries other than software development.It fits software development projects poorly, because these projects are mainlyabout people's abilities.

When Trust Goes AWOL

Trust is invisible, but the symptoms of its absence are not. That is the theme of this column, in which Clarke Ching recounts the difficulty one of his clients went through to rebuild trust with a customer. The customer had long ago lost faith in the quality of the products provided by this client since every piece of software delivered seemed buggy. But both were determined to make the relationship work. That's when Clarke Ching stepped in and took an agile approach to relationship therapy.

Clarke Ching's picture Clarke Ching
Meeting Agenda #1: Start on Time

Our society is founded on the importance of meetings, and it seems that the higher on the corporate ladder one climbs, the more meetings he must attend. Indeed, one of Michele Sliger's coworkers calculated that the amount of time she spends arranging meetings, getting to meetings, and in meetings equates to almost her entire workweek-thirty-six hours on average. Even though we may lose track of time in meetings, we all are painfully aware of the time we spend waiting for everyone to show up. In this column, Michele Sliger explains some of the tactics she's seen teams use to ensure that meetings start on time.

Michele Sliger's picture Michele Sliger
APLN 2006 - Pollyanna Pixton - Agile Leadership
Podcast

Pollyanna Pixton gives a presentation to the Washington DC APLN chapter in 2006.

Bob Payne's picture Bob Payne
Why Use Agile Processes Outside of IT?

Liz Barnett writes that beyond IT, the most frequent adoption of agile processes is found in teams using Scrum for team management. Agile processes won't provide the answers to all of our challenges. But if you dig beneath the surface, you might discover some interesting ways to use these ideas to address complex problems.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
Disciplined Approach to Adopting Agile: Four-Step Process

The agile community needs a structured approach to help it with its agile adoption efforts. Here we present the Agile Adoption Framework, a four-stage process for adopting agile software development.

TechWell Contributor's picture TechWell Contributor
Aligning Agile Efforts with Business Goals

A phrase heard often in agile development practices discussions is "let the product lead." Applied correctly, these four words powerfully focus an agile team's energy directly on work that provides the highest business value. Traditional engineering practices that focus on process often divert a technology team's energy away from quick delivery of business value, and toward design of infrastructure and architecture.

Guy Beaver

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