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

Feb
12

One for the team

By Delmar Hager

As a ScrumMaster I am really sold on the Agile methodology. My enthusiasm can create angst for the team. I am really proud of the team I am working with right now. They have overcome many obstacles and really embrace Agile. They do not have a “cargo cult” mindset but a real commitment to be the most productive team in the company.

The team is willing to be a leader and will take on the risks. Because of this can do mentality I wanted to have all who were interested to view our first sprint demo. So what I did was use the largest distribution list for our department for our invitation list. Well this was a mistake and really caused the team to become very uneasy. They pointed out that we had overcome many obstacles in this sprint but there was not really much to show for it in the demo. We have completed one user story well and it is “done” according to our new standards of acceptance but it was only one user story.

They were correct. Perception is everything and we only have a “simple” user story to display for all of our work the last 3 weeks. The extended stake holders would not really understand what was involved in what we accomplished.

So I canceled the original meeting and invited a much smaller group to stake holders to the sprint demo. A lesson learned on consulting the team before make a major decision on who to invite to our sprint review.

Categories : Work