Tag: Management

Impending Doom | Glossary

Prashant MJ Leave a comment

Definition: 

A sense of impending doom is a feeling of knowing that something life-threatening or tragic is about to occur. Sometimes starting fresh is either not possible or not the right choice. If a project is in midstream and could benefit from Scrum, it is good to switch. It is good choice to pick a pilot project that are currently headed toward impending doom yet still have enough time to recover and succeed.

Although this can be a risky approach to pick a struggling project that has nowhere to go but up. Delivering at all is often viewed as a success, delivering on time is often viewed as an amazing success. Because of the focus and intensity created through working in short sprints and because of the emphasis on creating at least some forward progress. Scrum is ideally suited to these types of projects. It is good to have an experienced Scrum Master or consultant who can guide or steer the project to achieve success and coming out of impeding doom situation. 

Further Reading:
Book: SUCCEEDING WITH AGILE Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn

Hand-offs | Glossary

Prashant MJ Leave a comment

Definition: 

Hand off is an act of handing or instance of passing something or the control from one person or agency to another. Learning development expert Allen Ward defines a hand-off as a separation of knowledge, responsibility, action and feedback.  Hand-offs occurs everywhere in a sequential development process. The business requirement  gathered is handed off to architecture, which in turn is handed off to programmer who will hand-off the code to testers. Documents are produced in projects to enable the hand-offs. Holding a traditional project manager accountable for meeting project specification and deadlines she didn’t contribute to is an example of a responsibility hand-off. 

Cross-functional teams became popular, as a response to the troubled caused on traditional development projects. Embrace Whole-Team Responsibility, means even though there may be one person for whom we look for certain task, just about everything is responsibility of the whole team. The more the whole team is involved, the more the team feels the shared responsibility, and the fewer hand-offs there will be. By eliminating hand-offs we eliminate problems created by waiting and the need to transfer knowledge from one person to another.

Further Reading:
Book: SUCCEEDING WITH AGILE Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn