A primer for the recruiting process in an Agile team, and a five step guide to getting started with interviewing as a team with Agile principles in mind.

“My team is working fine. Why do we need to do this?” The team lead explained his (and his team’s) stance about value based team goal setting - they knew what they needed to do and deliver, so why did they need team goals and appraisals?

Each coach’s style is decidedly their own, and different contexts call for as many different approaches. What should you consider when you join an existing team as a coach? What are some techniques to start on the right foot, and move the ball forward together?

In today’s world of constant change, many companies have recognized the need to change with the times. However, what we find is that the organizational change happens in silos. Whether they are organizational structure silos or process silos, I have one thing to say. Silos belong on farms, not in companies.

Here, the team isn’t managing the backlog, the backlog is managing the team. In the first instance, the product team was too hands off, and in the second, too hands on. What can the product team and the scrum master change to reverse this runaway train?

In many teams, pair programming or co-working are a daily part of the environment. How do you work together though, if you don’t know how to reach people, or when they are available? 

When failure happens on a team, how quickly can they recover? That is our definition of success

The reality is that if we have our work environment and culture set up to be self-organizing and psychologically safe, then the location where the person is working is irrelevant. This is only an issue in a command and control environment which is neither self-organizing nor safe. However, I also stress to companies that remote work should not be an accident. It needs to be intentional and deliberate.

If you find that you or your teams are constantly working overtime to keep up with the demands of the project, take a long look at how it is being managed and what customer expectations have been set.