Category Archives: Agile

We’re looking at the Agile and Lean frameworks from the Agile Practice Guide, from the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance.

What you’ll find is that there are many different Agile and Lean frameworks and ways of describing what are essentially very similar Agile practices. We’ve already looked at the core Agile practices and traditionally you could call yourself an Agile practitioner if you were doing those Agile practices, no matter what framework you were using in an organization. That’s why it’s important to understand what’s underneath these frameworks, and also the names of the frameworks that you might come across in your day-to-day work as an Agile practitioner.

There are a handful of core methods that you’ll definitely see in almost every Agile way of work, and then many auxiliary methods and even “scalable” methods because Agile has made its way out of software development, out of production in general and into the broader organization, into the Project Management Office and across the Enterprise as well. So we’re going to start with the core methods and the first one we’re going to look at is Scrum.

The Core Agile Framework of Scrum

Scrum is a single team framework for managing product development. In a project, we’re creating a product for a customer – something that delivers value for our customer. Now, we’ve already looked at this in the core Agile practice of the whole team approach, where it really matches up to what a scrum team consists of.

First we’ve got the Product Owner. The Product Owner represents the customer – they are responsible for maximizing the value of the product. The Product Owner represents the customer or represents the business and they help “groom the backlog of work” through the user stories, usually on a Kanban board (which we will see as well). In other words they put that work, in the form of user stories, into prioritization.

Continue reading Scrum – The Agile Practice Guide →

Demonstrations and Reviews – The Agile Practice Guide

November 3, 2019Agileagile, agile practice guide, David McLachlan, demonstrations, project management institute, reviewsDavid McLachlan

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The Agile Core Practices

There are certain core Agile practices you might be doing as a team – and not necessarily calling yourself Agile or using the framework names, but still working in an Agile way. Knowing these core practices is a great way to get a deeper understanding of Agile as an approach.

One of the best places to update your skills in Agile is from the Agile Practice Guide, by the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance. This one in particular is demonstrations and reviews.

Check out the video and article below!

Demonstrations and Reviews

As part of gathering early feedback, the team will complete features in the form of user stories. The team periodically demonstrates that work – the working product or the pieces that they’ve created – they demonstrate that to the customer or to the business or the product owner (remembering that the Product Owner in in the Agile Whole Team Approach represents the customer and the business).

So you could be demonstrating it to the Product Owner and they could relay that information, but usually it is best to go straight to the source and demonstrate your working increment to the customer or to the business who is ultimately getting the value that you’re creating.

Often this occurs at the end of an iteration of around two weeks to four weeks or when enough of those features have been completed into a set that’s coherent. For example maybe it takes a few of these features to be to be created to have something that a customer can see, feel and touch, and that you can actually demonstrate to a customer.

We demonstrate this increment or usable set of features so that we can start getting feedback on that increment. Team members can also get feedback that prevents them from heading in the wrong direction by using this approach, and that’s why it’s so valuable.

And that is Agile demonstrations and reviews.

– David McLachlan

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Continuous Integration – The Agile Practice Guide

November 1, 2019Agileagile, continuous integrationDavid McLachlan

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The Agile Core Practices

There are certain core Agile practices within Agile that can be used regardless of whether you call yourself an Agile team or not. Knowing these core practices is also a great way to get a deeper understanding of Agile as an approach.

One of the best places to update your skills in Agile is from the Agile Practice Guide, by the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance. This one in particular is Continuous Integration and other execution practices.

Check it out!

Continuous Integration and other execution practices

As we’ve seen, Agile is the combination of an iterative approach – where we’re iterating and improving our product – and also an incremental approach where we’re delivering something at the end of those iterations.

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Collaborative User Story Creation – The Agile Practice Guide

October 30, 2019Agileagile, project management, user storyDavid McLachlan

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The Agile Core Practices

One of the best places to update your skills in Agile is from the Agile Practice Guide, by the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance. This one in particular is collaborative user story creation.

Collaborative User Story Creation

With collaborative user story creation, it’s important because poor specifications are usually a major reason for project failure. We may have specified what the customer wants, and then when they actually get their hands on it they may actually have wanted something different. Or we may have misinterpreted what they wanted in the first place. Al of this results in them not really being happy with the end result. So poor specifications are often that major reason for project failure.

In Agile development, user stories are written with with a lot of the people involved, from the customers through to the people creating the product. We’ve got the developers who are developing our product, testers, business representatives or the product owner in the whole team approach. We have frequent informal reviews of the things that they’re creating just to make sure that they’re right, and everyone who needs to be is always involved.

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Release and Iteration Planning – The Agile Practice Guide

October 28, 2019Agileagile, agile project management, David McLachlan, iteration planning, release planningDavid McLachlan

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The Agile Practice Guide

There are certain Core Practices in Agile that are important to understand. If you’re performing some or all of these core practices then you’re likely getting the benefits of Agile whether you call yourself an Agile team or not.

One of the best ways to increase your Agile knowledge is through the Agile Practice Guide from the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance.

Check out the video and article below!

Release and Iteration Planning

When we’re release and iteration planning for Agile life cycles, two kinds of planning occur. In release planning, our business representatives establish and prioritize user stories for the release. Our business representative is that Product Owner role, but could also be another person who represents the business or the customer themselves who you’re doing the work for.

Part of their role involves gathering the requirements, and they’re defined as the Product Owner role in the Whole Team Approach. We gather that whole team together remember for an Agile project. They will establish and prioritize user stories for a release, collaborate with the team, and they’ll refine larger user stories (big pieces of work) into a collection of smaller stories, features or items. So different people can work on different cards and all up it’ll be a part of this larger release.

This then results in backlog preparation.

The backlog is the ordered list of all of the work, presented in a story form for the team. That story is usually “As a [role]”, “I want [feature]”, “So I can do [requirement]”.

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Retrospectives – The Agile Practice Guide

October 25, 2019Agileagile, agile project management, David McLachlan, pmi, pmp, project management institute, retrospectivesDavid McLachlan

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The Core Agile Practices

There are certain core Agile practices, that when you practice them you will gain the benefit of Agile whether you call yourself an Agile team or not. In fact, many different organisations might be using many different Agile Framework names, but not practicing many or all of these practices behind the scenes.

Knowing the practices themselves will also help you get a deeper understanding of Agile as an approach. The Agile Practice Guide by the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance has all of this information, and this one in particular is retrospectives.

Check out the video and article below!

Agile Retrospectives

In Agile development a retrospective is a meeting often held at the end of an iteration of around two weeks. As we’ve seen, iterations can be between two and four weeks, where we’re usually releasing an increment that a customer can see, feel and touch. We’re getting that early feedback on whether they’re happy with the product and happy with the requirements of that product.

At the end of that iteration, now we have a short meeting to discuss what was successful, what could be improved, and how to incorporate those improvements and retain those successes that we’ve had in future iterations. That means as we’re going along we’re improving and getting better. So we ask ourselves:

What worked well?
What didn’t work well?
What have I learned?
What still puzzles me?

By asking these questions and putting the feedback that we’re gathering back into our process, we are continually improving.

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Daily Stand Ups – The Agile Practice Guide

October 24, 2019Agileagile, daily stand up, David McLachlan, pmp, project management, project management instituteDavid McLachlan

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Daily Stand-ups

There are certain core Agile practices that you may already be performing as a team – and if not they are very easy to start. Direct from the Agile Practice Guide, and by the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance, this is a guide to daily stand-ups as they relate to Agile and Agile project management.

Check out the video and article now!

What is a daily stand-up?

Daily stand-ups are short meetings to update the team on what we’ve done since the last meeting, and what we intend to do before the next meeting. The intention is also to help remove any blockers and make sure everything is flowing nicely. In that way a daily stand-up is a short meeting that’s used to micro commit to each other as the whole team. With the whole team approach we’ve got everyone involved in the one place – it’s a cross-functional team. Everyone necessary is in the one place to produce this product or complete this project, so when micro committing to each other and uncovering and removing blockers we’re raising them in this short meeting called the daily stand-up.

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The Agile Practice Guide Video Course

October 22, 2019Agileagile, agile practice guide, David McLachlan, iterative, pmbok, pmi, pmp, project management institute, waterfallDavid McLachlan

The Agile Practice Guide Video Series

Have you ever wanted to learn about Agile, but did not know where to start?

Start here.

Directly from the Agile Practice Guide, which is a book designed to add Agile to the prestigious Project Management Professional (PMP) qualification by the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance, this video and audio series takes you through the whole range of their Agile lessons. From project life-cycles (why and when to use Agile), though to the common practices you will see, and the many different Agile and Lean Frameworks that have evolved over the past 30 years.

This free guide will help you get up to speed quickly, even on some of the rarer parts.

Check it out now!

Agile project lifecycles video 1. The different type of project life cycles – Waterfall, Iterative, Incremental, Agile (and Hybrid)

2. When to use Agile, Waterfall, Iterative or Incremental project approaches

3. The Agile Manifesto and Mindset

4. The 12 Agile Clarifying Principles

The Agile Core Practices

5. The Whole Team Approach

6. Early and Frequent Feedback

7. The Daily Stand Up

8. Retrospectives

9. Release and Iteration Planning

10. Collaborative User Story Creation

11. Demonstrations and Reviews

12. Continuous Integration

13. Servant Leadership

Agile and Lean Frameworks

14. Agile Frameworks – Scrum

15. Agile Frameworks – Kanban

16. Agile Frameworks – XP, Extreme Programming

17. Agile Frameworks – Feature Driven Development

18. Agile Frameworks – Crystal

19. Auxiliary Agile Frameworks – DSDM, AUP, BDD

20. Scaling Frameworks – SoS, SAFe, LeSS, Enterprise Scrum, Disciplined Agile

21. Agile Delivery – Team Charter, Burndown charts

22. Evolving the Organisation into Agile

I hope you enjoy! – David McLachlan

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Early and Frequent Feedback – The Agile Practice Guide

October 22, 2019Agileagile, agile practice guide, agile project management, early and frequent feedback, pmp, project management instituteDavid McLachlan

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Core Agile Practices

There are certain core Agile practices that, when you do them with your team, they increase your team’s engagement and results. You also don’t need to call yourself “Agile” – if you are doing some or all of these Agile core practices then you could class yourself as an Agile team, and you will no doubt already know the benefits they bring.

This particular core practice is “Early and Frequent Feedback”.

Check out the video and article now!

Early and Frequent Feedback

When you’re working on an Agile project or delivering in an Agile way, your projects will usually have short iterations. These short iterations are usually time-boxed pieces of work from two to four weeks, where you deliver something or showcase something for feedback. By releasing something in short cycles what we’re actually doing is enabling a project team to receive early and continuous feedback on the product’s quality throughout the development life cycle.

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The Agile Whole Team Approach | Agile Practice Guide

October 18, 2019Agileagile, agile project management, whole teamDavid McLachlan

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Agile Core Practices

Looking at the core Agile practices from the Agile Practice Guide is a great way to see if a team is really Agile, even when they may call themselves something different. This is direct from the Project Management Institute and Agile Alliance.

Watch the video below to find out now!

The Whole Team Approach

The Whole Team Approach means involving everyone with the knowledge and the skills necessary to ensure project success. What that means is instead of having to gather different people from all around the organization or another area to actually work on your project in little bits and pieces, we’re including them all in the one, whole team. They’re one hundred percent dedicated to the project and can really deliver much more quickly.

The team should be relatively small, as successful teams have been observed with as few as three people and as many as nine people. The reason for that is when you’ve got only three people, the communication channels are much smaller and much easier. You can’t have a lot of side conversations or a lot of extra conversations on scope, and overall the communication is much simpler. When you’ve got twenty people for example or many different people you could have conversations in many different channels, and from many different people as well. All of a sudden the communication becomes a lot more complex.

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