CONSCIRES AGILE PRACTICES

Core of Agile and Scrum

By Bachan Anand / Filed under Uncategorized / May 5th, 2010

The deeper I practice principles and values of Agile and Scrum it makes me believe that these principles and some of the core practices can be used in non software development scenario. When I reflect on my own journey these are the answers that come to me:

Agile and Scrum principles,

1. Show the effectiveness of breaking down your goals into small stories that can be achieved in shorter durations to gain success.
2. Draw attention to the importance of taking a breather in between your work execution to reflect on quality of work and most importantly making personal commitments to improve them.
3. Show the importance of collaboration between team members and customers to be successful.
4. Highlight the importance of informing your customer what you have done during regular intervals to increase transparency and receive feedback.
5. Point out the importance of delivering business value at regular intervals to stay competitive
6. Create an environment that allows you to focus on work that provides the highest business value.
7. Help you find a rhythm in your work and strive for continuous improvement.
8. Help limit the impact of failures by time boxing work to small duration and provide you opportunity to reflect on them and make necessary corrections.
9. Draw attention to the importance of laying down a product vision and roadmap.
10. Provide opportunity for people who are doing the work to self organize around the work, determine the highest value and excel in creating it.
11. Promote transparency by allowing the team’s goals and tasks to be visible to team members, management and business.
12. Create an environment where team members’ failures can be discussed openly.
13. Draw attention to the importance of business by determining business priority.
14. Promote creativity by giving them autonomy on how they do the work.
15. Foster courage by providing an environment where early failure is promoted to achieve long term success.
16. Support the emergence of strong design and architecture by allowing continuous improvement of the design.
17. Keep the team focused by planning work only for shorter durations.
18. Commit to short increments to avoid changes to scope of work that is already in progress.
19. Embrace change in scope and business priority for items that are not in progress.
20. Promote consistency and quality of work by clearly defining what DONE means.
21. Provide an environment where leadership can focus on strategy and vision and not worrying about how the team does the work.
22. Create an environment that embodies quality by working at a sustainable pace.
23. Keep the team members engaged by clear and consistent communication of goals from management.
24. Allow transparency at all levels to expose company purpose and goals to everyone in the organization.
25. Create an environment that encourages open discussion about challenges and leaving room for situations to take a political turn.
26. Expose disruptions and eliminate them so everyone can focus on the work they are responsible for.
27. Keep quality consistently high by finishing up work in smaller chunks to the committed quality before moving to the next set of work.
28. Visualize flow of work and make each other aware of what the team is focused on to promote compassion among the team members, management and business.

What do Agile and Scrum principles mean to you?

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