11
Hat tip to Nvoigt, Nvogel & D. Espina - all good comments, with particular emphasis on D. Espina's "sometimes, knowing one of your team is overly optimistic, you simply add your own margins to their input."
I'll just add one more frame to the question - this is a problem is in risk management. The core, fundamental responsibility of the PM is ...
9
In Scrum the team aims to complete the sprint goal by the end of the sprint. It shouldn't be necessary to estimate day-to-day deadlines since the delivery date is always the end of the sprint. I suggest you could stop trying to lead, stop estimating and allow the team to self-manage.
A team of three people is quite small however, and one problem may be just ...
9
The PO is the owner of the product, but that doesn't mean they can do watever they want with the product. At the end of the day, they represent the needs and the wants of all stakeholders.
Inevitably, you might end up in some situation where the PO has a different vision for the product than some of the stakeholders, but, like reasonable people, the PO and ...
6
Notwithstanding your approach and whether you are performing it properly, research the affects of planning fallacies. A planning fallacy is a specific form of Optimism Bias, where we have a tendency of under estimating adverse variables that could impact our performance and, therefore, we predict far favorable results than what is most likely. The bias ...
5
Before deciding on what to choose, be it Scrum, Kanban, XP, squads, tribes, guilds, clans and what not, it's worth mentioning that your eventual setup will depend a lot on the nature of the projects themselves and on the skills of the people you have.
You say projects aren't necessarily related to each other, but then you mention Scrum Of Scrums, which ...
4
State your case, CEO decides, you execute decision like your job depends on it.
4
I'd like add one more option on the table. In many cases estimation isn't really necessary. Situations when it can be useful:
You need to sync with other teams which depend on you
You need to predict the budget and decide if the project (or a feature) is worth starting
In any case, if you estimate there has to be some decision made based on the estimates. ...
4
If they feel that the environment is safe and friendly - they will speak up. I noticed that such environment is created when people have discussions on personal level.
The thing that I see almost always works is going to lunch together. People get closer as they start discussing personal stuff too, which makes them more comfortable. Though frequently the ...
3
There are two different aspects that you want to focus on in this retrospective: product failure and the work team members have put in.
For product failure, one format could be a timeline of all the product decisions taken during the project. Collect data of all the things that have happened with the product, decisions take, feedback received, etc., and map ...
3
Sad to say, but too many places are still using the "walk around and guess" methodology.
The main component is a deadline - decided upon by management, usually - and a hi-level concept of what needs to be done.
It consists of mainly guessing, bluffing your way and having random long-winded meetings that never create action items and have no follow ...
2
Everything mostly copy-pasted from Wikipedia.
Agile refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve via collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams.
Rapid application development (RAD) is a software development methodology, which favors iterative development ...
2
One solution might be to use Kanban, without sprints, and focus on the importance of the work, its prioritization and order, and less so on building estimates. Building in Sprints can also work, but the focus would probably still need to shift (see also this question).
Another solution would be to split your work into "exploratory" work and "...
1
What can, and should, a Product Owner / Product Manager do if the CEO has mandated that the team builds something which the Product Owner feels is not in the best interests of the customer?
Build a case. Try and find metrics or measures that highlight the flaws in the suggested approach.
Aside from presenting a case and aiming to influence the CEO's ...
1
Look at this example: Thousands of programmers of Sberbank moved to new office Agile Home.
At Sberbank all the IT/business employees, related to product development for internal and external use are separated into tribes, each tribe fully owns its product concept, strategy of its development, documents and code.
They call this process sbergile. (Russian ...
1
Something else to consider here. e.g.:
"They want to improve the frequency and quality of interactions basically."
"No, there is something more." Outside of work-related settings, real people never describe their [social ...] interactions in this way. Therefore, try to guide the team to try to articulate the work-related [...
1
For the weaknesses there's a specific pattern that can be used
My greatest weakness would have to be my constant drive to strive for perfection, realistically there is no such thing as perfection so it's important to feel confident in a project being complete.
However by acknowledging this and learning to overcome this it has lead me to produce some of my ...
1
A lot of strengths answers can be tailored to the organisation doing the interview. For example, with a company that prides itself on the knowledge of its staff then it might be worth talking about one of your strengths as your background reading and quick understanding of problem domains.
For weaknesses I recommend answers that can be interpreted both as ...
1
We will be working in 2 week sprint cycles
One other thing that may be worth considering is having a longer sprint cycle. For example, if your sprints were 4 weeks long, would that give you more time to do the research work and still deliver value within a sprint?
However, I am not really clear on the research phase of the project. If we need to research ...
1
TL;DR
Agile frameworks like Scrum are founded on empirical control and validated learning, so "failing fast" is not inherently a negative. In fact, canceling a project that can't be salvaged is often the best way to avoid chasing sunk costs. However, understanding the Five W's of the failed project can lead to process improvements if and only if ...
1
You're conflating several competing objectives here. Celebrating the hard work or worrying about future, less challenging work is not an objective of a retrospective. If you want to celebrate the work performed, then go celebrate. That would involve food, drink, and someplace nice to socialize. If you want to worry about future work, that would involve ...
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