On my recent visit to Wellington I was talking to some colleagues working with government departments interested in Agile. It was a bit of an eye opening experience and given the AgileNZ Conference in Wellington is only 2 weeks away is something I would like to start talking about.

So…. can Agile work in government?

I love being Scrum Trainer, mentor and coach. It provides regular insights into human behaviour that I personally find utterly fascinating.One of my favourite exercises that I use in Scrum Training is the Ball Game. It is a simple game and gives teams a wonderful opportunity to experience the power of self-organisation, frequent micro-planning and retrospection.

What happens to the role of the Business Analyst in an increasingly Agile world? I tried to answer this question a few years ago in a Modern Analyst Article and now having been through a number of Scrum implementations it seems like a good time to reflect on these predictions.

With a transition from Waterfall to Scrum the role of the Business Analyst changes and my opinion improves for a number of reasons.

In  sprint planning, how many times have you experienced deadlocked story estimation? Conversation and inforomation has been exchanged, but the team just can’t agree on a estimate number and the sprint planning meeting is getting painful. Normally people will settle with a bigger estimation just to be safe. Although I agree in principal to do that and not to drag the sprint planning overtime, I normally suggest two things before settling to a bigger number.

In this movie "I want to run an agile project" we follow the experiences of one such brave project leader, Luke, as he has many different encounters throughout the enterprise, working to establish and deliver his Agile project.

Recently I have been helping a fellow Scrum practitioner with a strategy for working with a client who is determined that Scrum cannot deliver fixed date projects. The company has made wonderful leaps forward using Scrum but under pressure the evil, highly ingrained habits of predictive, deterministic thinking emerge and the company now risks the rocket we launched falling back down to earth as gravity drags them back to the same of way they have always done things.

There was a shockwave of disbelieve and anxiety on Saturday night as the New Zealand rugby public saw their heroes handed a loss by a very energised and deliberate Wallabies side. The All Blacks lost the game for one reason and one reason only – an inability to change tactics to meet the scene in front of them. And this isn’t the first time they have suffered this flaw either. The funny thing is that it has striking similarities to software projects.

It seems everyone is obsessed with Scrum tools these days. Every time we run a Scrum course people ask “what tools do you recommend?” The answer is always the same – whiteboards, index cards and post-it notes. The reasons for this are many. In my coaching work I see team after team try one of the myriad of tools available and the result is almost always the same – a slow Scrum uptake. Why is this?

Wow recently a major bank has picked up on something we’ve all known for a long time.  Stories are powerful.  We engage with them, we grow with them and we use the context of their knowledge to help build our own understanding.  And who has the best stories?  One group is great writers who can link their experiences with our own; and the other is US the people in business who make business happen – often this needs some BA help which we’ll come to further down – but the key point is remember how much engagement you have in a great story... you could have heard it many times but it still involves you  :-)

In our experience helping companies implement Scrum, Product Ownership recurs over and over again as THE big issue. In this blog article we provide some guidance on what makes a good product owner and include a Product Owner position description.

The recent Gartner/FEI survey of CFO’s faith in IT is damning and well, frankly, downright embarrassing. IT is increasingly been seen as a necessary cost that fails to deliver the promised benefit. This has been going on for as long as I can remember so what the hell are we doing about it?

On 26^thMay four Clarus staff delivered a presentation outlining some of the lessons we have had learned using Scrum at a range of companies throughout New Zealand. It was a capacity session.

Thanks to Dynamic Controls for providing the venue and to the ANZTB and Clarus for sponsorship.