People have been asking me about “how to be successful in agile” and the answer is pretty simple. Its just that doing it is not always easy
\
Continue reading “The secret to being successful in agile is pretty straight forward”
Advertisements
Month: May 2015
Is there a hierarchy to stories in agile projects
In my projects I often have a story (some work that can be done in an iteration) and an epic (something that will take more than an iteration).
I then break my stories into
- User story (As a user I want to do something so I gain some benefit)
- Performance cards (the system will be able to do something by iteration sometime) and
- Experiments (we want to know something so we will do something and measure something).
But I think I am out of step with the rest of the agile world. I am told there is now more of a hierarchy that goes like this …
Does that look right to people?
Using value stream maps
A value stream is a “Lean Manufacturing” tool.
It is a way to identify where customers experience value and where we consume value to provide our product or service.
The approach is quite simple.
Everything is awesome in agile – maybe this is NOT how your retrospectives should go
I wrote a blog article about awesome agile teams a few minutes ago
Sadly the cynical side of me started thinking about teams where the agile coach was a really awesome cheerleader for agile and the team retrospective involved a lot of discussion about how awesome it is doing agile.
Then this song started playing in my head …
Watching some Agile is Awesome videos from Henrik Kniberg
There is a lot of material out there that says “Agile is awesome” but a lot of it is more annoying than useful. The material seems to consist of a blog article or video with someone saying that they found “waterfall” and “old school” companies to be bad, but then they found Scrum and their team was transformed to utopia.
So I thought I would share a couple of videos that demonstrate how agile can actually be implemented and be really awesome, where the video includes a decent argument about the things needed to make it work..
Continue reading “Watching some Agile is Awesome videos from Henrik Kniberg”
Is there a template for a BA role description?
Is there a generic job title or description?
A lot of people ask me for a good template for a BA role – but I tell them there is no such thing.
A BA “helps people understand things”, but different business analysts help different people understand different things in different contexts. Some may not even have the job title of BA.
Fortunately though, it is possible to agree on what a BA is doing on a specific project, or for a specific client. Doing this can help with setting and managing expectations.
How can I explain my BA role to someone else?
I always start with a sentence about why the BA is there in the first place. This is a much better starting point than trying to list all the things a BA might do without providing the reason.
Continue reading “Is there a template for a BA role description?”
