Justin York – Simdesk

“Del's leadership was instrumental in bringing agile methodologies to our development team. While transitioning to scrum, I often consulted with Del about how to handle things in the scrum framework. Once our team was fully running on scrum, I felt that we were at least twice as productive as we had been in the past.”

Matt Willson – Pervasive Software

“As Delmar's manager for over a year, I was very impressed with the simplicity of his designs, the quality of his software, and the tenacity he brought to problem solving, especially customer issues. Delmar provided strong leadership for the developers who worked under his tutelage.”

Steve Mook – Pervasive Software and Simdesk

"Del is experienced,enthusiastic and tenacious - an excellent team lead with expertise in UI design and development and Scrum project management. He is willing to learn new technologies, challenge assumptions, take risks, and be accountable for results. His skill and leadership would benefit any team that seeks to improve its ability to deliver value to customers and to the business."

My Agile Experience

What was really exciting was to see the Scrum methodology adopted company wide at Simdesk. Because of the success of our team I was able to train and mentor other team leads, managers and corporate executives to use Scrum. This lead to increased productivity and better communication among the teams, support, product managers and upper management. Goals are well defined and consistently meet.

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books change collaboration learning management release team Team Member training

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My Reading List

Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)) by Lyssa Adkins (Paperback - June 14, 2010)

Available on safaribooksonline.com as a Rough Cut.

Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum [Book] by Mike Cohn - Addison Wesley

Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time by Susan Scott

Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders - Paperback (Jan. 16, 2006) by Jean Tabaka

Agile Product Management with Scrum: Creating Products that Customers Love (Addison-Wesley Signature Series) Roman Pichler

Practices of an Agile Developer by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt - Pragmatic Book Shelf

Jan
29

Enterprise Transition Community

By Delmar Hager

We have a book club at work. The book under discussion right now is Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum by Mike Cohn. If you have not read this book it is a must read. I bought copies for my team (I did get reimbursed later) because I thought it was so good. The following are comments about ideas presented in this book.

Agile so many times starts at the developer level. Usually a team lead or manager has read about Agile and wants to use it with their team. That is the way I started, I was a team leader. This works great for a limited period of time util you run into the bureaucracy of the standard software development process. That is the time to start thinking of how to transition the whole company or division.

One concept introduced by Mike is the Enterprise Transition Community (p. 63).

The Enterprise Transition Community exists to create a culture and environment where change can be released by those who are passionate about the success of the organization and where success leads to more passion from more people. The ETC does this not by imposing changes on the organization but by guiding groups who are implementing changes, by removing obstacles to doing Scrum well, and by creating energy and excitement for the change.

In other words you need a team at the appropriate level in management to take up the Agile cause. They are the ones who will guide the agile adoption and remove the obstacles. Read this section in the book, it might help you in your adoption.

Categories : Adoption