​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.

​
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.

This is one of the most controversial topics of SharePoint Online and everyone seems to have a theory. For some it works like a charm and they never get to experience the pain while others even open up tickets with Microsoft Premium Support and still the issue remain unresolved.

Yes i am referring to the great file attachment and upload sizes. When you go online to look for the right answer, all you get is confusion with out dated information. For example old articles, new ones, One Drive for Business sync tools, classic vs modern and you will get unsure exactly what sizes to recommend to a client. So, I decided to do some testing with various large dummy file sizes around what I was reading the limitations to be. The results were close to Microsoft’s article, but with a very interesting caveat .

There are a few factors when you want to know max file sizes:

• Classic interface
• Modern interface
• List Attachments
• Document Libraries
• Drag and Drop
• Upload Multiple

Lets admit that migration of any sort is a pain and migrating something to the cloud for the first time is always challenging. I have been going through this for quite some time and finally had the chance to play with Azure Migrate and it has been a good experience overall.

​If you plan to go to Azure you will have 2 choices for your current environment:

• Recreate you infrastructure from scratch
• Use Azure Site Recovery to “move” your on-premise VMs to Azure

The goal of this post is to explain you what is Server Migration and how it can help you for your migration to Azure.

​The Azure Migrate service assesses on-premises workloads for migration to Azure. The service assesses the migration suitability of on-premises machines, performs performance-based sizing, and provides cost estimations for running on-premises machines in Azure. If you’re contemplating lift-and-shift migrations, or are in the early assessment stages of migration, this service is for you. After the assessment, you can use services such as Azure Site Recovery and Azure Database Migration Service, to migrate the machines to Azure.

Azure Migrate helps you to:

• Assess Azure Readiness: Assess whether your on-premises machines are suitable for running in Azure.
• Get Size Recommendations: Get size recommendations for Azure VMs based on the performance history of on-premises VMs.
• Estimate Monthly Costs: Get estimated costs for running on-premises machines in Azure.
• Migrate with High Confidence: Visualize dependencies of on-premises machines to create groups of machines that you will assess and migrate together.

​I recently created a Microsoft Office 365 development environment via https://aka.ms/offdp

I was creating an environment to do some SharePoint Modern theming (I created a new Communication Site via the modern Admin interface on my new tenant), but noticed the classic (rather the older) Change the Look interface:

When you create a new Office 365 group, there will be an associated SharePoint Team site is created automatically. In this case, we need a new Group with an existing team site. To start with, make sure connect to Office Group is enabled at tenant level.

Login to SharePoint Online Admin Center >> Click on Settings from left navigation. In settings page, under "Connections from sites to Office 365 groups", Set "Allow site collection administrators to connect sites to new Office 365 groups".

Now, you can connect your SharePoint Online sites to Office 365 groups. To connect an existing SharePoint Online site to new a Office 365 group, follow these steps: 

Login to SharePoint Online site collection with Site collection administrator rights >> Click on the Settings gear icon >> Select "Connect to new Office 365 group". You are now presented with overview page about a quick explanation of what will be created by Office 365 for your site collection what's going to happen by connecting your site to an O365 group. Click on "Let's get started"

We all know that Get-SpoSite cmdlet contains more than one parameter set and you may only use parameters from one parameter set and you may not combine parameters from different parameter sets. Moreover, it retrieves and returns properties of all site collections that match the given criteria.

But sometimes you run into weird issues when you are doing the most common things. In this case, one of my friend was cleaning up his demo Office 365 tenant.  To make an overview of all site collections, he ran the following cmdlet:

​This would make a list of all site collections that are available in  Office 365 tenant and export it to a CSV file. When going through it, he noticed that none of the site collections were flagged as a hubsite. This couldn’t possibly be true as  he created many hub sites for testing purposes.

I decided to check this in my own tenant to see if it was a local problem. So let’s see what happens.

​Running the following PowerShell returns all site collections that contain the word intranet.

​Since ASP.NET Core 2.2 was released I have been working on getting all my different applications updated and using in-process hosting. I pretty quickly hit an issue with an application that uses SQLite. As soon as the application tried to access the database I ended up with the following error.

After some Googling, I found an issue on GitHub that details the problem. It turns out that when the application gets its current directory it is returning the path to the IIS process that is hosting the application instead of the directory when the application is.

On another GitHub issue, I found a link to a recommended workaround. Add the following class somewhere in your application. This code comes here.

​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.