I have been reviewing agile adoption process for product company, service company and also product company where vendor is engaged in developing/supporting product either following Fixed Price or Time & Material. My job is to observe why team fails to deliver product on time while following agile (Scrum) methodology and recommend and coach team to deliver working product.
Below is my observations based on process review, interaction with management, vendors and
team members. I attend all ceremonies like daily scrum, sprint planning,
sprint review and retrospective to understand gap in adoption. Also review tools that team is using before coming up with any recommendation.
Adoption of
Agile without any formal training – Team has
not gone through any formal training and have no or little knowledge about
agile project management. Just following management instruction to deliver project using agile.
Individual and
Collaboration vs Command and Control – Agile
values and principles is completely misunderstood by team. Manager/leads still
driving team rather than team taking own decision based on inspect and adapt.
This leads to dissatisfied team and team member not motivated.
Fixed price
contract and agile – Vendor says
fixed price and agile can’t go together and vendor consider fixed price
contract is top most impediment. Vendor’s management team is passing this message
down to team as well that leads to misunderstanding about agile in fixed price
project.
Sprint
duration not consistent – Sprint
duration is not consistent so velocity can’t be calculated that leads to
unpredictable delivery timeline.
Definition of
Done (DOD) and Acceptance criteria not defined for sprint – Team is iterating sprint by sprint but
product not. There is no clarity about DOD and acceptance criteria and team itself
testing product and logging defects.
Project
management tools not properly configured/utilized – Team is using tools like Jira, Rally or RTC and some them even MPP but
these tools not helping team in release prediction. These tools are also not in sync
with other tools like requirement management, bug tracking etc and not getting updated regularly so not helpful.
Continuous
Integration missing – CI tool is
available but not configured and team is not configuring CI that leads to
resource waste towards the end of project. Team spend many hours in every
sprint to fix only integration issues towards the end of development.
Team structure – Team doesn't have proper scrum
recommended structure. Lead playing role of scrum master, technical people
playing role of product owner. Scrum master and
product owner role is completely misunderstood. Team is also not cross
functional because sprint runs only for developers and testers still follow
waterfall approach
.
Agile metrics
not implemented - Team doesn't have any defined metrics like burn-down chart, team velocity, release burn-down
etc. Team velocity is known in absence of metrics.
Product
Backlog is not managed and groomed properly – Team not
working on breaking big feature/change request/defects into a small and
manageable stories. One big features getting completed in multiple
sprints.
Reach to me on naveenhome@gmail.com or +91 9810547500 for corporate training.
We deliver training on Test Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven Development (BDD), Cucumber, Selenium, Jira Agile, Scrum, Jenkins, Scrum Master, Scrum Developer, Product owner, agile estimation and planning, writing user stories etc.
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