Often we confuse leadership with management. Agile teams need more “Leadership” than “Management”. A simple differentiating factor between a manager and a leader is this : “If we took away your position of power given by an official title, would you still be able to influence the others with your opinion, knowledge and intellect?” Ruthless focusing on this rule has helped us identify following “knowledge areas” in which our self functioning Agile Teams need leadership to deliver best quality products and meet the customers expectations with regard to the release schedule:

• Marketing Leadership: this typically comes from people who interface with the client and help them prioritize the requirements by business priority and risks. The result is that we work on highest priority items first, eliminating risk early and providing business value early.
• Technical Leadership: this typically is done at a level of what is traditionally called “technical lead”. The leads help the teams answer questions and guide the teams on technical architecture so that technical debit in a product does not accrue on the product. This enables us to build products that are not only extensible but also maintainable.
• Process Leadership: this is very important for us. The teams need to know what are the simple yet stringent rules of SCRUM that teams can’t opt out of. The teams also need to know how to approach problem solving keeping the values of SCRUM - simplicity, collaboration, time boxing, inspection and adaptation. A leader who can naturally attract confidence of the people helps team learn and improve the process that they select and define themselves. The process leadership also helps the individual team members to answer questions about their own career paths and business - position job alignment.

Popularity: 8%

Posted on December 16th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Leadership, Skills | 1 Comment »

One of the most popular methods to understand if a team is doing SCRUM or not is through the use of what is called “Nokia Test”. It is a very simple yet very strict test and almost 80% of teams who claim to be doing SCRUM do not pass even Level 1. Here is an overview of the test:

LEVEL 1

• Iterations must be time-boxed to less than six weeks / Do your sprints start and end on planned dates
• Is the software completely tested and working at the end of an iteration
• Can the iteration start before specification is complete

LEVEL 2

• Does the team know who the product owner is
• Is there a product backlog prioritized by business value
• Does the product backlog have estimates created by the team
• Does the team generate its burndown charts and knows its velocity
• Does the team have outside people disrupting the work of the team during the sprint

Popularity: 12%

Posted on December 13th, 2007 by admin
Filed under: Assessment, Maturity | No Comments »