Dev Breakthroughs

What’s the secret to staying fresh, lean and mean when you’re a hot tech company on a fast growth trajectory? A fascinating document brought to our attention today today by Andrew Mager, hacker advocate at Spotify, answers that question in some detail by telling us how the music streaming juggernaut does it: by dividing up its business into small clusters — which it calls ‘squads’ — and running each like a startup in its own right.

Over the time I collected a lot of material about agile and leadership. Most isn’t very useful but some diamonds are great. Mith the aim of letting it grow I present the current list of agile diamonds to you here :

- Tools for retrospektives

- Tools for Team Surveys

- Tools for moderating big groups

- Tools / Insights for agile managers

- Video Material

Maybe it’s all the time I spend with startups, but while I strongly value Scrum’s ideas behind self-organizing teams & continual feedback – I can’t help but feel Kanban represents the next level of agility, giving us more flexibility and capitalizing on the lessons we’ve learned from Lean.

As a developer I’ve been happy with scrum, but as I’ve been more involved in project management I’ve felt that there is something missing. When I talked to two of our most experienced project managers at Kentor; Susanne Ribbing and Cecilia Andersson I realized that what I was missing was project governance.

Looking thoroughly, it is enough with a single sentence description of a scrum project to identify the need for project governance.

Throughout a number of sprints the team focuses on the most prioritized items from the product backlog to reach the project’s goals

I’ve highlighted a number of terms that are very much treated as predefined constants by the scrum methodology. I think that’s right, because scrum focuses on the developers. Still, those terms need to be defined and that’s what project governance do.