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Agile Essential Team-Level Agile: Nail the Basics

We must work as a team! Teamwork is critical! There’s no ‘I’ in team! These mantras are plentiful and many Agilists believe that success at the team level is the foundation to success at the organizational level. But what does it really mean to work as team and is there a common recipe to build and grow a successful agile team? Agile believes in principles before practices and in multi-disciplined, self-organizing teams. All teams need direction and guidance, but with an agile approach no one should be telling the team how to do their job. Teams need to be empowered to make choices rather than be told exactly what to do. But sometimes things can start to unravel and too much time and energy can be wasted arguing about the basics. You can forget about scaling agile if your team is unable to clearly demonstrate the value of agile at the team level. But, get the basics right at the team level and engaged, highly motivated, cross-functional teams of teams can follow.

In part three of this blog series, Brian and Ian review how a team played the Practice Patience game. They had been a Scrum team for over 6 months and were used to holding more traditional open ‘brainstorming’ style of retrospectives. The article reviews their experience with the cards guiding them to improve their application of Scrum, including some quotes from their Scrum Master.

Scrum Essential Learning - Learn Scrum with Essence Cards and Coaching

In part three of this blog series, Brian Kerr and Ian Spence review how a team played the Practice Patience game. They had been a Scrum team for over 6 months and were used to holding more traditional open ‘brainstorming’ style of retrospectives. The article reviews their experience with the cards guiding them to improve their application of Scrum, including some quotes from their Scrum Master.

Image of the Scrum Practice Sprint Review card. Pulled from the Scrum Essentials Practice developed in conjunction with Scrum Inc.

Scrum and its hybrids are the dominant approaches used by Agile teams today. However, despite Scrum being a seemingly simple framework, many teams struggle to apply Scrum well and fail to achieve the faster delivery of higher value products that are promised. Playing the Practice Spotlight game is a simple way to improve any team's understanding and application of Scrum.

Lifecycle Management Tooling in a UK Banking Environment and Transformation

IJI has been engaged with a major UK bank over the last 18 months helping them introduce new methods of working, and IBM’s Collaborative Lifecycle Management tooling to support these methods. Business Analysts now capture their requirements in Rational Requirements Composer (RRC), Solution Architects create their designs in Rational Software Architect (RSA) using the Unified Modelling Language (UML), Infrastructure & Security Architects add deployment topologies to the designs using RSA’s Deployment Planning extension, and everything is underpinned by Work Items and Source Control in Rational Team Concert (RTC).

Image of game board built using Team Space

Serious gaming to encourage and nurture an agile mindset, beyond just software and product delivery teams, using jargon-light agility cards.

scaled agile portfolio epic lifecycle and epic states

Epics have a lifecycle, they don’t magically appear fully formed. There is work to be done to progressively elaborate a business case and if the Epic is approved then there is further work to progress the Epic through implementation. This post explores the Lifecycle of an Epic and the states it progresses through in that Lifecycle.

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