Silver Stripe Blog

One of the more important aspects of general management is facilitating meetings. It’s rather surprising how boring most meetings are. Given the frequency of occurrence you would have thought that people would have gotten pretty good at it. But no, most meetings are dull, boring and go on for far too long.

The ability to have good meetings becomes even more important when doing agile software development, because there is a lot more emphasis on social interaction when compared to traditional processes. Indeed, one of the core skills of being a good Scrum Master, Coach or Project Manager in an agile setting is to be a good facilitator. Almost all agile processes have a meeting to plan the iteration (eg. Sprint Planning meeting in Scrum), a daily standup meeting and a closing iteration retrospective or reflection meeting. Key to the success of agile is the ability to keep these meetings short, interesting and productive and thats where the facilitation skill of the Scrum Master or Project Manager comes into the picture.

As a result, I’m always on the lookout for good, interesting articles and books on meeting facilitation. Here are some ideas, click the link name to go to the original article.

Continue reading ‘Meeting Facilitation for Agile Teams’ »

One of the hardest parts of implementing Agile in an organisation is managing the change that is required for the transition to be successful. It is very easy to start out with Agile, then find some resistance to the change and finally everyone going back to old ways of doing things. Another pattern is when the agile process is adapted so much that it is virtually the same as the old way, only under a new name. For these reasons, organisational change management is an important component in adopting an agile process in a company.

Virginia Satir, a noted family therapist developed a model for how change occurs. Although developed in the context of family therapy, the model has been widely adopted to describe organisational change. One of the key components of the model is that things get worse before they get better. Organisations face a period of resistance, followed by chaos, before they start to improve. By understanding the model, organisations will be better prepared to understand that resistance and chaos are part of the change and will proceed with the change rather than reverting back to old ways of doing things.

For a more detailed discussion of the Satir change model, and what can be done at each stage of the change, check out this excellent article by Steven Smith.

The Agile Software Community of India is organising a few conferences and workshops in the coming months.

• Agile workshop to be held at PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore on 8th Sep 2007
• Agile workshop to be held at Medicaps Institute of Technology & Management, Indore on 22nd Sep 2007
• Agile Chennai 2007 conference to be held at Anna University, Chennai on 4th and 5th Oct 2007

All the workshops and conferences will be introductory sessions for those new to Agile. So, if you are in India, and are interested in Agile, do drop over to one of these conferences.

I’ll be there at the Agile Chennai 2007 conference. It would be cool to meet up at the conference if you are in Chennai on those days.

In an organisation you often hear about the “business side” and the “technical side.” The business side includes roles like management and business analysts, while the technical side includes development and testing. The terminology of the “business side” and “technology side” is the worst possible thing that can happen in a company because it deepens the divide between managers and developers and ends up creating an us vs them situation. [More about that here: Managers and developers: Are you two teams or one?]

As someone said in an email discussion, there is no “non-business” side. Everyone working in a company is on the business side in some form or the other. Developers are on the business side by developing products that help the business. Managers are on the business side too. Don’t get fooled into thinking that only a small group of people are on the business side. Everyone is on the business side — and if not everyone should be.

Does your company have a “non-business” side?