Dinner Meeting "Agile/Scrum Challenges PLUS..."

​Addressing Your Agile/Scrum Challenges PLUS  Project Management: What do Great PM’s Do — What are Terrible PM’s Avoiding?

Presented by Neil Potter

This month, Neil covers two topics on Agile and Project Management. Part 1 discusses some of the reasons why Agile teams run into problems and how to overcome them. Part 2 discusses some of the project manager traits that lead projects (agile or not) to either be successful or run into problems.

Part 1:

Do you have any of these symptoms:

• Poorly defined backlog of requirements — little clarity about what the need is, what to build or test.
• Overcommitment — each sprint is bursting at the seams with incomplete work flowing from one sprint to the next with no predictable release date.
• Chronic technical, resource and customer surprises that consume the team.
• Customer and management delivery expectations not accurately set or met.
• Chaos (a smokescreen) is used to avoid accountability.
• Agile feels more like a sweat shop than the new cool way of developing systems.

Agile/Scrum is a framework, and without close attention to the practices used, Agile/Scrum implementations can quickly lead to quality problems, chaos, and missed budgets and deadlines. When an Agile/Scrum implementation has problems, no one is having fun.

In 2016, The Process Group polled 450 people and two-thirds were not happy with their Agile implementation. They experienced chronic chaos and quality problems. One-third was meeting deadlines with few quality problems. There is a huge difference in the practices used by the teams that do well, and the teams that are challenged.

This webinar is about maximizing the benefits of your Agile/Scrum implementation while addressing the problems and frustrations encountered so far. If you are new to Agile/Scrum, this session will tell you what to look out for.

Part 2:

You have noticed (surely) that there are great project managers that get things done and are loved by their team members, and then there are project managers that hide in their cube while the world falls apart around them. This presentation will describe the symptoms, causes and actions that can be taken to resolve the PM issue before a re-assignment is necessary.

Topics covered:

• Great practices of a PM
• Great PM mindset vs. terrible PM mindset
• What drives people + their 6 human needs
• Letting engineers self-PM - what happens? Who needs a PM anyway!
• Letting PM’s be practitioners - what happens? No one needs a PM!
• Separating causes: skill and accountability
• Redefining problems in solvable terms + meeting the 6 human needs
• Exercise: practice flipping the excuses 180 degrees

About the Presenter

Neil Potter is co-founder of The Process Group, a company formed in 1990 that consults on leadership challenges, process improvement, CMMI, Scrum, software engineering and project management. He has 28 years of experience in software and process engineering. Neil is a CMMI-Institute certified lead appraiser for SCAMPI appraisals, Intro to CMMI instructor (development and services), Six Sigma Greenbelt and Certified Scrum Master. He has a B.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Essex (UK) and is the co-author of Making Process Improvement Work - A Concise Action Guide for Software Managers and Practitioners, Addison-Wesley (2002), and Making Process Improvement Work for Service Organizations, Addison-Wesley (2012).