In IT as well as other areas communication or the conveyance of information is an important factor. As you might have experienced yourself, communication in general is an error-prone thing. Misunderstandings and perceptions occur regularly and have an impact. Wrongly understood information could lead to unnecessary costs for your organization and frustration amongst staff.
Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats is a method that helps to reduce meeting times and make meetings more effective. The method is nowadays widely spread since it is simple, robust and effective. With this post I want to introduce the method briefly and also tell you about some experiences I’ve made using it.
Daily stand up meetings were introduced to me together with Scrum. From my point of view having a daily stand up meeting is a very good idea for coordinating and planning the day. Since it makes a difference whether your daily stand up meeting is effective or not, I want to share some thoughts on that subject.
Planning Poker is an estimation technique often used in agile software development. All Scrum teams I’ve worked with or met at gatherings know planning poker and use it on their projects. So I assume it is very widely spread. However, often enough I’ve seen that Planning Poker isn’t played the right way. There are certain rules for playing Planning Poker that need to be respected in order to get the full benefit of playing it. Team members reveal their estimation to each other before everyone has made an estimate for themselves. In case Story Points are used, there is often a debate about Story Points interfering the actual estimation and exchange of information in Planning Poker. This is just two of the …
With this post I want to shed some light on my experiences with Sprint Burndown charts. Especially the question of who owns the Sprint Burndown chart and is responsible for drawing it. In case it is not presented on a flip chart, the matter will be about who maintains the status in the used tools. Should it be done by the team that implements the software or should it be done by the person responsible for planning the scope, the product owner. In Scrum, a method of agile software development, should it be possible that the scrum master or agile coach draws the Sprint Burndown chart? Before we narrow down the topic, let’s look at what a Sprint Burndown chart is good for. A Sprint Burndown chart is a chart …
