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Showing posts from May, 2017

Working agreements - a great tool for taking teams quickly from storming to norming

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We've started using 'Working agreements' at iflix over the last few months. These team building tools have been around for ever, but for some reason I have never used them before. Working agreements are the working processes and standards/rules the team all agree to follow. Simply these can be about how a team organise work or generally interact with each other. Working agreements can be set at any time in a teams formation and can consist of something as simple as "Stand - up is at 9.30 sharp". If you've worked with agile (or any teams) in the past, you probably have a set of norms already. The secret sauce here is being explicit and making the norms visible. Working agreements should then end up becoming embedded as Team Norms. At iflix, we try to define these team norms at formation of teams, or when we move a team onto agile processes. The team gets together and comes up with a list of norms they all agree on. There is no predetermined list but typ

Agile Program Management at iflix - Physical and virtual boards and how we run our scrum of scrums.

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Early program management at iflix At iflix, our tech teams are spread across Asia, Europe, Africa and Australia. At the time I joined, a lot of change had/was happening (and it still does). The organisation is in the early stages of adopting agile and teams are evolving rapidly. Visual tools for agile program management Managing programs of work for software companies is hard, even if you're using agile to manage your work, it must be really effing hard, why, because... PMO's. Organisations would not willingly put PMO's and their corresponding bureaucracies in place by choice would they? Are there other ways to organise multiple agile teams, multiple locations and multiple delivery goals without a PMO?   We took the following agile manifesto line as a guiding principle when designing our approach to program management at iflix: “ Individuals and interactions over processes and tools” . Whilst I wanted to create tools to represent WIP and highlight issues/depen