Prevailing Service Management

My IT Service Management team provide Incident, Problem, Change and Configuration Management services in line with ITIL . Our work is highly variable and ranges in complexity since we primarily support other IT professionals in their IT operations.  Agile is the chief service delivery methodology in our organisation and so we have adopted and tailored Agile's Scrum methodology as our way of working. I have been fortunate enough to present on this topic to numerous conferences but time doesn't allow me the opportunity to explain how we work in great detail to interested peers. I thought I'd share more detail on how my team has adopted Scrum, and this article assumes you already know some basics of Agile or Scrum. As a side note, my team as a whole uses Scrum; the Problem Management analysts use kanban for their daily business-as-usual (BAU) work (managing problems/known errors). In this article, I'll focus on the team's adoption of Scrum. The main ...

One of the most common practices in Agile is the daily stand-up or scrum. The term scrum, adopted from the game of rugby, is a daily opportunity for team members to unite and share: -          what they did yesterday, -          what they’ll do today, and -          what is blocking them from delivering value to their customers. The reason it is also called a stand-up is because the participants stand. Usually taking 10-15 minutes, this gathering forces participants to stand and encourages them to be brief and provide only relevant information for their team. In most circumstances, the standup works well. However there can be times when the team members start to discuss trivial or irrelevant matters about what they did or will do. There can be various reasons for this, including perhaps a self-induced pressure to say something rather than nothing, or to...