Prevailing Service Management

As an IT Service Management (ITSM) leader with a strong preference to leveraging Agile, Scrum and Lean (including LeanIT) to effectively and efficiently deliver IT operations, I became quite interested in the concept of the Scaled Agile Framework by Dean Leffingwell and his associates. The Scaled Agile Framework ® (pronounced SAFe™) is “an interactive knowledge base for implementing agile practices at enterprise scale”. In the SAFe website, Leffingwell states that “this model of agile adoption has been elaborated primarily in my books Agile Software Requirements: Lean Requirements for Teams Programs and the Enterprise (2011) and Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises, (2007) and my scalingsoftwareagilityblog.com . It has been successfully applied in programs of only 50-100 people, and in enterprises employing thousands of software developers.” SAFe has four (4) core values: 1. Code Quality (because you can’t scale crappy code); 2. Program ...

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 key roles for an agile team is the Scrum Master (or otherwise known as the Iteration Manager). Hartman (2009) summaries the Scrum Master's responsibilities as: "The Scrum Master is responsible for ensuring that the Team adheres to Scrum values, practices, and rules. The Scrum Master helps the Scrum Team and the organization adopt Scrum. The Scrum Master teaches the Team by coaching and by leading it to be more productive and produce higher quality products. The Scrum Master helps the Team understand and use self-management and cross-functionality. However, the Scrum Master does not manage the team; the team is self-managing." But who should be a Scrum Master, when the team may already have a team leader or manager? I'll briefly explore the opportunities and challenges of two main approaches. Team leader as scrum master: Opportunity : As Hartman stated above, the team should be self managing but when disputes arise, the team leader has...

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...