​I don't claim that i am an expert on this subject and still there is a long curve of learning involved as my career grows in to new roles. What i am sharing here are some of my observations, notes references etc related to agile leadership and how well an organization should adopt them for survival.  Let’s examine some favorite ideas and concepts around agile leadership. 

In my experience, there are at least five criteria for successful agile transformations. Lasting organizational change happens:

1. When there are leadership and guidance, not command & control.
2. When there is alignment across the organization instead of the pursuit of local optimization efforts or personal agendas.
3. When the collaboration of all participants beyond hierarchies is the norm, not an exception.
4. When we acknowledge that management principles of the 19th century are unsuited to solve complex problems of the 21st century.
5. When managers become servant leaders.

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The following  focus on the main concepts related to agile leadership: from servant leadership to the agile mindset to creating a learning organization. The lists are not supposed to be comprehensive but provide the interested reader with a starting point for further research.

​Scrum Artifacts – results/products of our management activities – are designed to increase transparency of information related to the delivery of the project, and provide opportunities for inspection and adaptation.

​There are six artifacts in Scrum:

1. Product Backlog: An ordered list of everything (aka stories) that might be needed in the final product
2. Sprint Backlog: Selected items (stories) from the Product Backlog to be delivered through a Sprint, along with the Sprint Goal and plans for delivering the items and realizing the Sprint Goal
3. Increment: The set of all the Product Backlog items completed so far in the project (up to the end of a certain Sprint)
4. Definition of “Done”: The shared understanding of what it means for a piece of work to be considered complete
5. Monitoring Progress towards a Goal: The performance measurement and forecast for the whole project
6. Monitoring Sprint Progress: The performance measurement and forecasts for a single Sprint

​Items 5 and 6 might look more like activities, but they are considered artifacts in the Scrum Guide, and therefore we will explain them as so. You can imagine their output (tracking information, burn-down charts, etc.) as the real artifacts and these two items as ongoing activities (like Product Backlog grooming) or part of the Scrum events (part of Sprint Review and Daily Scrum).

In Part 1 we extensively covered   the basics about Scrum, Agile Manifesto , the Principles, facts and myths about Scrum and the roles within the team. 

In this post we will concentrate on understanding  and will do a deep dive analysis of:

- Scrum Events
- Scrum Activity - Backlog Grooming
​- Scrum Activity - Slack

Scrum events are designed to enable critical transparency, inspection, regularity, and adaptation. You must prefer to use these predefined meetings with fixed objectives and maximum durations instead of ad-hoc meetings, which most likely waste our time.

There are just five events in a Scrum Project:

1. Sprint: Each Scrum project is a set of Sprints. A Sprint is a container for the four other events (as represented in the above diagram), development effort, and the maintenance of the Product Backlog.

2. Sprint Planning: Sprint Planning is the first event inside a Sprint. The Scrum Team plans the items they are going to deliver in the Sprint and the way they will deliver them.

3. Daily Scrum: The Development Team starts working on the objectives of the Sprint as soon as Sprint Planning is completed. During the Sprint, the Development Team holds a daily meeting (normally 15 minutes) to coordinate the work for the next 24 hours. This meeting is called the Daily Scrum.

4. Sprint Review: Before the end of the Sprint, the Development Team presents (demonstrates) the outcome of the Sprint to the customer and receives feedback. This meeting is called Sprint Review (also known as Sprint Demo).

5. Sprint Retrospective: After the Sprint Review and just before the Sprint is over, the Development Team holds an internal meeting to review the Sprint and use it to improve the process (lessons learned) in the next Sprint. This meeting is called Sprint Retrospective.

Time Box is an essential concept in Agile methods, a predefined fixed maximum duration of time in order to maximize productivity in which we freeze the target and work with full focus on certain tasks or objectives. Time-boxed events  repeat many times, until the final goal of the project is achieved. All the changes are applied only when one time-box is finished and we are ready to start the next one.

The duration of a time-box should be agreed upon and fixed. We are free to change the duration based on lessons learned, but not frequently, and never based on single occasions. For example, we are not allowed to say that “we have a lot to do this time, so let’s increase the duration for this particular case”.

What we are allowed to say is “based on the previous ten time-boxes, we realized that the duration of our time-boxes is not suitable, and a 30% increase in duration might better fit our needs. So, let’s increase them from now on”.

After some thought i have decided to write and share some of the basics about Scrum. A lot of people have different views, theories and ways of doing things which they call Scrum. While i do not contest some of those practices but its essential to understand the concepts and strongly agree that every organization team will need to mold and churn some process to make things work. 

So in this series of blogposts, the first one will be addressing the following:

- Scrum and Agile
- Agile Manifesto
​- Agile Principles
- When to use Scrum VS other Methods
- Facts and Fibs about Scrum
- Scrum Timeline
- Scrum Roles and Team

At a later time, i'll share the more advanced stuff and also touch base with SAFE.

It is not possible in some projects (especially in IT projects) to gather all the requirements upfront because of their extreme uncertainties. Therefore, we need a project management method flexible enough to deal with many change requests that appear during the project and keep the project team productive.

There are a number of systems designed to provide these two properties, and a group of them are called Agile Frameworks. Scrum is a project management method of the Agile group; it is the most famous and the most broadly used one.

Scrum is based on a certain process, which i'll explain in the next few blogposts as we progress. This Scrum process will not be effective, unless it is combined with certain roles and artifacts.

On a number of occasions i have come across the issue with Agile Story Points and how the final software output is measured. Though there is no best way to measure a software delivery but a lot of experimentation has been done in the recent years. In this post i will be sharing some of my personal experiences and will try to highlight the Agile Metrics and ISO Standard Measures. I personally feel, both of them can be mixed together to a certain level to measure the output. 

Without a doubt Agile processes and procedures have brought advantages for speedier delivery of software  that  meets developing client needs. Be that as it may, the opportunity given to individual teams to manage their own processes has made it difficult to manage the activities across Agile teams – what we call managing ‘Agile-at-scale’.

​To be specific, Agile metrics such as Story Points, may be used by individual teams to manage their own affairs but are very little help for the tasks of planning and monitoring progress across teams, for understanding performance and whether it is improving or not, and for estimating future investments.

Senior management is responsible for setting budgets and allocating resources optimally so as to deliver the greatest value to the organization, and for tracking progress against budgets across the organization. This cannot be done properly for a software group using only typical Agile processes where there are no common performance data across all the teams. These management tasks become even more difficult for an organization that has contracted out its software development to external suppliers that use Agile processes, but that do not use any standard performance measures. I have come across a number of organizations who lack in defining individual, team and product level KPIs to achieve a target - though they do achieve something but not precisely hitting the nail with the hammer.
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In this post i'll try to explain the challenges that management faces when confronted with the limitations of Agile metrics. I'll try to show some of the stuff which has been experimented, how simple but effective and long-established ISO standard software measures can fit seamlessly into Agile processes to enable managers to estimate and control Agile delivery at scale. This can be achieved without needing to change any of the underlying Agile processes, and whilst continuing to obtain the benefits that Agile teams can bring in the speed and flexibility of delivering business value.

Purpose of this post is to describe the Software Project Audit Process which is capable of capturing different  activities which take place throughout a Software Project life-cycle. The main purpose of this process is to audit the quality of the deliverables at the client site. After the auditing, the quality level of the audited activity will be presented using a measurement called Metric.

The process will be used by both the Development team and the Software Project Audit team to derive their own metrics to measure the quality status of a software product in its life cycle. Eventually, the trends of such metrics will be used to predict or change the Projects' way forward by identifying any potential failures which can happen in the future.

Also in this post i will explain the several guidelines used by the Software Project Audit Process for Project Progress calculation, mapping Payment Milestones with Project deliverables and Project Artifact reviewing.

Further, it will explain the way how the process differ from typical software development life cycle and how it has been automated by integrating several testing tools and testing methodologies as well as embedding best industry standards.

Scope of this post is to provide an insight about ;
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• Software Project Audit Process
• Importance of Metrics
• Analysis of Metrics
• Automated Process of Metric Generation
• Skills required to generate certain Metrics
• Guideline for Project Progress Calculation
• Guideline for Mapping Payment Milestones with Deliverables
• Guideline for Review of Project Artifacts.

​For the past few weeks a lot has been spoken, written and talked about is GDPR Compliance. I have always retained the view that Europeans are much more intelligent when it comes to compliance and regulatory of Personal Data then Americans.  I am not going to use the word privacy because its been the most mocked around word in some quarters and of course in USA we all know how well its protected and implemented. :D

I'll start with first highlighting some key aspects of GDPR - like

​Its not something new and before GDPR we had Data Protection Act so if you had it implemented then you will go through less pain since a lot of elements are partially covered by it. The whole idea and concept is to know how the data is collected, where the data resides, stored, processed, deleted, who can access it and how its used for EU citizens. This means that organizations will be required to show the data flow or lifecycle to minimize any risk of personal data being leaked and all required steps are in place under GDPR.

In short, GDPR is to have common sense data security  ideas, especially from the Privacy by Design school of thought: minimize collection of  personal data, delete personal data that’s no   longer necessary, restrict access, and secure data through its entire lifecycle and also by adding requirements for documenting  IT procedures, performing risk assessments under certain conditions, notifying the consumer  and authorities when there is a breach, as well as  strengthening rules for data minimization.

In this article i am going to share some of the key Project Management elements for a successful SharePoint Intranet Deployment. In my previous articles, I have touched a few and have highlighted some of them and this article will be mostly covering the on premise or hybrid style deployment rather than SharePoint Online. Though you still need to do a few things which can apply to SharePoint Online as well - so lets get down straight to business.

As most of us know that SharePoint deployments in most scenarios are fairly consistent, which makes it easy to just follow the plan and deliver a SharePoint deployment. Personally i use a template with all the main tasks involved in the deployment with minor changes to accommodate third party integrations or updates.
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Below is a screenshot of the SharePoint Deployment Template which i have used a lot of times and its a simple version which i am sharing.

I already mentioned in my previous article SharePoint Intranet: Learn to Tame the Monster about things you should consider before implementing an Intranet. Now its time to have a look at the ideal SharePoint Team Task List and Roles. Identifying and defining the roles and responsibilities is the one thing that can make the biggest difference for a SharePoint success with stability. Its extremely critical that we establish these task lists with roles and responsibilities as one of the first tasks on a SharePoint project; its absence is a common thread for any challenged project I have come across, which usually involved skipping or skimping on this step.