Category: Agile

Understand your Team with SCARF

If you are a Scrum Master or coach you might sometimes wonder why people act and react the way they do.
The SCARF model can help you to understand which factors are driving peoples reactions.
The model lists factors that cause a reaction of either approach or avoid. The factors are:

Status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness

Here are some ideas what you can do to minimize reactions of avoidance in your Scrum team:

  1. Increase status by praising sprint results as well as team improvements, ideally in public.
  2. Increase certainty by protecting the sprint from outside disturbances. Make sure the expectations are stable and understood.
  3. Increase autonomy by letting the team take decisions.
  4. Increase relationship by colocating the team members. Select team members by personal interests as well as technical expertise.
  5. Increase fairness by treating yourself and the team members equally.

Keeping those factors in mind can help to better understand peoples reactions and adapt your own behavior so that it minimizes reactions of avoidance.

Team Complexity – The Underestimated Factor

Most people would agree to say that an IT project is complex if it has to cope with difficult technology and a challenging business context.
But it is not just technical complexity that threatens the success of a project. Team complexity is an important and often underestimated factor that highly affects the likelyness of success and failure of IT projects.
Even if you have a simple technical problem to solve, it can get much more complicated if you do it with a complex team.
The main problem is that effective communication is very hard to achieve with complex teams. But effective communication amongst the stakeholders, developers, business and operations is one of the key success factors for IT projects. Thus having a team with low complexity reduces risk and increases efficiency. But why is this often not recognized? I think the reason is that dynamic effects are hard to measure and invisible most of the time.
Inspired by the article Projects fail due to dynamic complexity (German) written by Prof. Dr. des. oec. HSG Stefan Grösser I thought about common factors that affect team complexity and therefore dynamic complexity.
To create more awareness in terms of those factors and make the subject more tangible I’ve created the Team Complexity Calculator. Its a fun tool that can be used to get a better idea of how those typical factors affect team complexity. It does not produce absolute results, so please don’t take it too serious. 😉
If you know additional factors that affect team complexity, please let me know.

Those factors are based on experience I’ve made in projects ranging from small to very large sizes.

Agile Games Released

Today my Windows 8 app Agile Games passed the Microsoft certification process. It is now available in the Windows Store.

Planning

The app acts a a host of typical games that are utilized in agile projects. The first game is planning poker which can be now played by distributed teams over the internet. Other games will be added to upcoming versions. I implemented the app using HTML5/CSS/JavaScript and jQuery. The backend is based on HTML Web Sockets and hosted on Windows Azure cloud infrastructure. Although in my personal opinion XAML/C# is more productive than HTML/JS, I must admit that app development with HTML/JS is great fun. Existing techniques and frameworks such as jQuery or Knockout can be used and the JavaScript code has a high potential of reuse in different environments and across platforms. The WinJS APIs allow a smooth integration to use Windows functionality such as search and sharing. And last but not least the touch interface lifts the user experience to the next level.
If you want to know to develop how those apps, please attend the Windows Store App Development Workshop. I think Windows Apps have a great potential. They are well suited to reach users in a modern way. Most business workstations today are equipped with Windows so the market is huge. Let’s start coding!

Integrated Process Management with Open Source

If you ever tried to create an execution environment to automate business- or integration processes based on Open Source products, you know that this is not an easy task. Although Open Source products like Activiti or Apache Camel are of high quality, they do not run with production grade quality out-of-the-box. For serious usage scenarios typically a lot of work is required to integrate those products into a sound platform. This fact hinders companies to use those great products and turn to closed source alternatives from Oracle, Appian or Inubit, just to name a few.

Now there is an interesting alternative called oparo. oparo is an integrated process automation platform based on rock solid Open Source products. oparo is not limited to BPMN processes only. It rather focuses on the entire process spanning business, workflow, mediation and integration.

The platform does all the plumbing required to turn single products such as Activiti, Apache Camel, Apache ActiveMQ, Lucene/Solr, etc. into a platform that can be used out-of-the box. Even better, oparo is entirely ASF2.0 licensed (today and tomorrow) which offers broad usage options and does not involve any hidden costs for enterprise features.
oparo shields the process engineer (the guy who analyses and automates processes) as much as possible from low level technical tasks such as connecting and transforming Camel and Activiti message payloads. It offers a unified development approach for the process engineer to focus on business functionality instead of technical plumbing. Moreover it comprises additional valuable services such as process flow tracking, humantask integration or a registry. Due to oparos service binding approach, those services can be easily integrated in existing IT landscapes using almost any technology (e.g. .NET, JEE, HTML5/JS/CSS). The runtime is scalable (in terms of technology and licenses), the set up is automated and the whole platform is based on proven standards.

If that sounds promising, you can give it a try. You can find more information and a downloadable jumpstart distribution at oparo – the efficient process platform (German only)

Agile Process Management with Open Source

Are you interested to know how to combine process management, agility and Open Source software? Then the roadshow Agile Process Management with Open Source is for you. It is going to take place in several German cities during autumn 2012. I am going to present ways to achive efficiency in the area of process automation using proven Open Source technologies paired with agile approaches. In times where CIOs have to think twice before they spend IT budget, undoubtely an interesting topic to talk about. It have some interesting ideas to share and hope for inspiring discussions.

Collocation Is Vital!

What does collocation mean? The concept is very simple. It means bringing together the people who work on a software product in a physical environment. This seems to be natural. But in highly distributed work environments that we have today it is not anymore.

I’ve been working on agile projects for many years and I always hear that collocation is difficult. Especially in larger enterprises it seems that the hurdles are high. There are many reasons stated by different people.

Here are some examples:

  • There are no adequate rooms available (managers).
  • The buisiness guys don’t understand IT. We can’t work in the same office (developers).
  • The IT guys don’t understand our business. We can’t work close to them (business).
  • Our outsourcing partners are from country xyz. It is impossible to work with them in one office (managers).
  • The business people have their work to do. They simply don’t have the time to work closely with IT (business).
  • I have to concentrate. Working close to others would always disrupt my work (developers).
  • We don’t like travelling. (all of them)

All of those are valid arguments, but to me it seems that they are sometimes artificial. In this case reluctancy to change is stronger than the will to increase efficiency.

From my experience collocation is an underestimated factor that can greatly improve effectiveness of teams. The study Collocation Impact on Team Effectiveness goes in the same direction.

Another interesting read is Collocation, Collocation, Collocation. Quote from the blog:
“A big part of the problem is socio-political in nature and would appear to be deeply embedded in the human DNA. We naturally tend to come to trust those that we have regular contact with (our family / village / tribe / region / country / team) and have an equal and opposite tendency to distrust those on the outside of these habitual daily contact networks (all those that the lock on our front door or the defences around the tribal village are designed to keep out).”

If a company is interested in real agility and effectiveness, I think it should try really hard to create collocated work environments and not give up early. It might somtimes be difficult, but the reward will be better results and most likely even better motivated staff.

Scrum in Reinsurance

On 5. July 2012 I am going to give a presentation introducing an agile Project in the area of reinsurance which I accompanied as Scrum master and solution architect. The conference is going to take place in the SAP Service Center in St. Leon-Rot near Walldorf.
The presentation is called Scrum in reinsurance – a success story. It covers factors that made the project a success as well as impediments. The aim is to share our lessons learned on the way to successful agile project management. I hope to see you there.

Scrum and Silverlight in Reinsurance

Today I would like to share a success story of a project I accompanied as Scrum Coach and Solution Architect from analysis to production.

Main success factors were:

  • Scrum (Agile Development)
  • Cross functional Team
  • Service-oriented Design (SOA)
  • Silverlight RIA

You can read more in the case study Modernization of business partner management.

Lightweight Collaboration Tools

When you work with distributed teams it is important to have lightweight tools for efficient communication. Here are some free tools that I would recommend:

Surveymonkey – Online polls
DFN Scheduler – Scheduling
Skype – Video and voice conferencing
Chatzy – Private web based chatrooms (port 80 only, mobile access)
Trello – Scrum and Kanban boards (highly interactive)
Kunagi – Scrum boards (includes tools like planning poker)
Teamviewer – Online meetings and remote control (free for non commercial use only)