Toronto Project Manager – Paul Henman CSM

As you probably know, I’m looking for a new gig as a Scrum Master (excuse me while I plug my resume) and one of the challenges I’m finding is assessing the “Scruminess” of a company/project.

Fortunately I’ve found two handy tools: “The Scrum But… Test” and “10 Questions for Your Scrum Master Interview“. The first one (which is based on people who say “we do Scrum but…” and a long list of exceptions!) could be used as a self-test, for someone on a project to assess their level of adoption, but I’ve been using it (along with the 10 Questions) as a basis for things I need to learn during interviews.

The good news is that I’ve been interviewing with a company that I think is doing Scrum in a very pragmatic way: not blindly trying to adopt everything but rather picking the parts which make sense and having a roadmap for their next steps. I think the interviews have gone well and hopefully I’ll hear more in the next few days.

After an aborted contract as a Scrum Master with a local company, a friend pointed me at a blog post by Vikas Hazrati entitled “Do you follow Agile? You are fired!”

He lists eight reasons why managers who don’t understand Agile might decide you aren’t committed to the project/company; I thought I’d review that list and add my personal experiences: (more…)

Jeremy D. Miller says “Call me a Utopian, but I want my teams flat and my team members broad” – then call me one too. (more…)

There’s not much info on their website yet, but put the date in your calendar: Agile2008 is in Toronto, August 4th to 8th.

Isn’t it ironic how I don’t have time to update this blog when one of the keys to a good Scrum team is achieving a sustainable pace? It’s frustrating because we’re doing some interesting stuff and solving (or working towards solutions for) some issues which I suspect affect other Scrum teams that are trying to be effective in a traditional enterprise environment.

Well, given that I’m here at last, I should post at least one thing of interest. One of the things I think we’ve changed that has helped is the way in which the Project Scrum Master (that’s me for the new release) and the other Scrum Masters provide updates to the management team: it used to be a bi-weekly presentation and Q&A session, but a few months ago we changed this to a weekly stand up meeting around our whiteboard. Not only does it mean the status is more up-to-the-minute (because it only takes a moment for one of the SMs to update the white as opposed to changing the PowerPoint slides) but it’s become a much more interactive discussion and decision making session.

As for our challenges, I think one of the biggest is where we have interfaces to non-Agile teams/organisations, e.g. purchasing an item that has a lead time of 2-3 months is problematic when we’re not looking (in detail) that far ahead. We are trying to forecast our hardware requirements, for example, but it’s not easy when the User Stories in our Product Backlog could change priority (impacting when we need the equipment) or be removed from this release altogether. We’re trying some techniques and all we can do is review and adapt them accordingly … doesn’t that sound like a novel idea?