Blog | Ivar Jacobson International

Product Ownership Infographic & Health Check Guide

Successful Traits for Effective Product Ownership

Key to realizing benefits from agile is strong customer representation through empowered Product Ownership – to guide the team in delivering a solution that maximizes end-user value. But this is also often the hardest agile practice to get working effectively, because of its novelty for many stepping into the role, and because of the challenges in balancing time commitments with existing business responsibilities, and combining incisive decision-making with broad-based stakeholder representation and negotiation. Download the infographic and post it on your wall as a daily reminder of what's needed or better yet, download our Product Ownership Health Check Guide.

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.

Empowering Software Teams with Essence

The software development industry is a revolving door of information and technology. New and innovative solutions are being executed every day. As the Industrial Internet continues to flourish, there must be solutions to the growing need for empowerment within software teams.

The solution may be as simple as creating a common ground that facilitates both vocabulary for practice definition and a framework for the assembly and analysis of methods.

Power of Checklists_Neil Armstrong Glove

The Power of Checklists

The immense power of simple check-lists for monitoring projects

Surgeons, astronauts, airline pilots and software professionals. What do all these people have in common? Well, for one, all of these professionals are very highly trained – in most cases in takes many years to reach a point where you can practice without supervision.

But even highly trained, experienced professionals can have a bad day, and make the occasional mistake. The problem is, if you’re an astronaut, airline pilot, or surgeon, and you make a mistake, lives can be lost. Software development, perhaps, is somewhat less life-critical, most of the time.

Simple checklists can help reduce human error dramatically. Some reports suggest that surgical checklists introduced by the World Health Organization have helped reduce mortality rates in major surgery by as much as 47%. Neil Armstrong had a checklist printed on the back of his glove (pictured), to ensure he remembered the important things as he made history as the first person to walk on the moon.