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.

Tags

adoption architecture books build change collaboration deploy design integratoin learning management release safety team Team Member team safety training user stories

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

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick) by Seth Godin

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

Jun
11

People, Passion, Productivity

By Delmar Hager

This alliteration sums up what we want to see on our teams.

People

It starts with the person. It does us good to contemplate how important each individual is on a team. You do not have a team without people, how trite but all so true. When you start treating the members of a team as resources in a company you have removed their humanity. A team members first of all wants to be respected for who they are. They are a complete person with dreams, goals, likes, dislikes,  families, and a job. We a leaders must value each individual for who they are. Rarely does an team member purposefully not be productive. If we do have a situation like that we need to understand where that individual is in their personal life and where they need help. I cannot emphasize enough the value of the individual first.

Passion

When you are passionate about a task nothing will stop you. It is amazing how many obstacles are overcome when we have a goal that we are going to meet no matter what happens. We have all had experience where we worked on a project that we really enjoyed. It was hard to keep our minds off the project. Passion comes from really believing in yourself and the vision of the project you are working on.

In a class Mike Cohn commented on he did not want his team members working on open source projects. He wanted them so passionate about their work that they had no desire to work on any software outside of their job.

I know many of us downplay emotion on the job. But what would happen to our work place if everyone was passionate about their job?

Productivity

Getting the job done and doing it well what we all want. As we build up the individual and guide that team we will see amazing productivity. I am always perplexed when managers interfere with the composition  of a team and do not expect any changes in productivity.

When you have a closely knit team, any change in the makeup will have a very negative affect on  productivity. The worse case scenario is when a team member is removed from the team without any team input. This is like losing a family member.  It will take the team time to adjust.

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