Engaging in Agile – the more the merrier?

As a project manager and scrum master, I often get the question – why do suppliers sometimes offer a separate engagement (or contract) manager on top of the one or more Agile teams that are asked for in a request for proposal? In Agile environments, teams are self-organized, and the product owner is the only person in the team that makes decisions on scope and delivering the most business value with the available budget. So, why in some cases is such an engagement manager still added to the service offering?

Agile basics and working remote

The research version of our Capgemini post ‘Out-of-office-agile - Agile basics in a remote world’

Working from home is becoming more and more common nowadays. People increasingly want to work from home. This change has been boosted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Due to the consequences of the pandemic, we were forced to work from home. Mankind ran quickly into solutions to keep the work going but took little time to inspect and adapt. As this situation was expected to be temporary, people didn’t feel the urge, did it superficially or focused only on the obvious. Still the situation and its urgency, might have caused overlooking the basics of working agile and its underlying principles.

As it now turns out not be a temporary thing, we need to have a deeper dive into what’s needed to improve working remote or even from home. In this article we will reflect on remote working using the agile practice of Inspect and Adapt.

The inspection results are based on our own experiences on projects and signals we get from our fellow Agile coaches. To deepen our inspection we choose to use the Agile Manifesto and the Scrum guide.

The Fast and the Furious (and other Fs) retrospective activity

Recently I lacked some inspiration for a good technique suitable for the upcoming retrospective. As the team was growing in their agile way of working, I decided to leave it to the team to come up with a nice activity. I was very surpised with the outcome. A brand new activity which we called the Fast and the Furious (and other Fs).

The Bug Battle game

A couple of years ago, I was the Scrum Master in a project. Though we had a steady delivery of business value, we also noticed that too many bugs were found by our Product Owner. The team knew it had to improve by finding and fixing bugs earlier in the process. Therefore I introduced the ‘Bug Battle’ game. How does this work?

Ideal iteration length in agile projects

A question that always pops up when you start an agile project, is what is the ideal iteration length for this project. As always in agile the correct answer is "it depends". But on what?

The Bicycle Game

In one of my projects I developed a retrospective technique that is the combination several other techniques. This technique I called the ‘bicycle game’ because of the result: a nice bicycle. Do you want to know, how this bicycle game works?

Enthuse the team in retrospectives during the entire project

A couple of years ago, I did an agile project with a lot of iterations. At the end of each iteration we held a retrospective. All of these retrospectives had the same agenda and each agenda item was implemented the same way over and over again.  Though we found aspects to improve every retrospective, it became a weekly grind. Starting an new project with over 40 sprints I was questioning myself: How can those retrospectives stay interesting for the team, even after dozens of sprints?