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
27

Team Work

By Delmar Hager

Agile relies on self organized teams. But most of us do not really understand what it means to work on such a team. The model I see most often is that the ScrumMaster or the Technical Lead will take control of the team.

I have seen one team where the ScrumMaster actually created all of the tasks for a sprint and assigned members of the team to work on these tasks. In other cases the technical lead controlled what tasks are created and made sure the team know who are working on the tasks.

I know that each team members may have special skills and it makes sense that they are the best choice but in doing this we loose the value of the team. A team functions best when we share knowledge with each other. It is great when you have a team in which members will help each other even if they are not the expert in the field. Also, a team protects itself when the knowledge is distributed among the team.

As team members we should be willing to learn new technologies. Also, team is more efficient because there is no “down” time.

When a team creates the tasks they are going to do in a sprint they assume ownership of those tasks. They have created the tasks and will be more likely to see that they get finished.

Categories : General