Spotify Labs | Spotify's Engineering and Technology Blog | Page 5. At Spotify we have our own “Agile à la Spotify” manifesto to create alignment and direction for our improvement work. This blog post describes the background for creating the document, what it is and how we are using it. A little over a year ago my colleague Karin Björkén woke up early one morning and started writing “an agile manifesto for Spotify”. After observing and talking to different teams in different locations, it had become clear that we did not have an aligned view on what agile means to us as a company.
We prided ourselves on our agile culture, but at the end of the day we weren’t really sure that we understood that to mean the same thing. Other agile coaches had similar observations so we loved the idea and wanted to work together on it. In this blog post I will give an overview of how we are building our backend infrastructure at Spotify. Powering the Spotify service is a backend of dozens of different, specialized service implementations. Squad Health Check model – visualizing what to improve | Spotify Labs. (Download the cards & instructions as PDF or PPTX) (Translations of this article: Chinese, French) A lot of companies experiment with ways of measuring and visualizing how their teams are doing.
They’re usually called “maturity models”, and involve some sort of progression through different levels. The intent of these types of models is usually benign – for example managers or coaches in larger organizations who want to get a sense of where they should focus their improvement efforts, spot systemic problems, and help teams become more self-aware so they can focus their improvement efforts too. We prefer to use other terms like “health check model”, because “maturity” sounds a bit… well…. patronizing. Plus, most of our models don’t involve progressing through different levels, and the primary audience is the team itself rather than management. Organizational improvement work is very much a guessing game (how do you know what needs to be improved, and how will you know if it’s improving?).
Guide to Agile Practices. Accelerating agile. The KJ-Technique: A Group Process for Establishing Priorities. By Jared M. Spool Originally published: May 11, 2004 Back in the late 1970’s, the US government commissioned a study to look at effective group decision making. In the study, they asked 30 military experts to study intelligence data and try to construct the enemy’s troop movements. Each expert analyzed the data and compiled a report. The commission then “scored” each report on how well it reported the actual troop movements. Each expert then reviewed all of the other experts’ reports and rewrote their initial assessment. What was different between the first report and the second? Deriving Priorities When Resources are Limited In design, our resources are limited. In our consulting work, we’ve found that, like the military experts, our clients usually have most of the answers already in their own organization.
For this, we’ve turned to a group consensus technique we’ve been using for years, called a KJ-Method (also sometimes referred to as an “affinity diagram”). The KJ-Method: Step By Step. Identifying an Agile Transformation Scorecard -LeadingAgile. In a previous post, I asked the question of how can we tell if we are succeeding with an enterprise agile transformation. In the post I’ll close with the notion of using a balanced scorecard for signaling progress towards the transformation’s core business drivers.
A couple of comments were shared after the last post was published that cautioned on the dangers of creating a scorecard that would not drive the “right” behaviors or that was too broad and couldn’t be connected with the transformation’s overall success. This was great feedback and I appreciate the engagement with the post. In keeping with my desire to resolve this question, I’ll explore a bit more of the notion behind why many organizations are seeking a transformation. I think answering this question will help to frame up a sample balanced scorecard in another post. Thanks for continuing to share your thoughts and feedback along the way.
So the question asks… Why transform? Thanks for reading! Print. Agile 42 blog. Agile42 is organising the Lean Kanban Southern Europe 2014 conference in Bologna on May 30th, an event endorsed by Lean-Kanban University We are happy to welcome the Lean Kanban global conference series to Italy! The Lean Kanban Southern Europe conference brings together professionals who realize the value of Lean thinking.
This is the event for technology managers, business leaders, and change agents who want to build quality, predictable delivery, and a culture of continuous improvement into their organizations. Part of the Lean Kanban global conference series, it's been scheduled on a one-day format that will accommodate networking and participation from a diverse set of attendees. The program is under development but already includes David J Anderson, Bjarte Bogsnes, Jabe Bloom ...
What Does it Take to Become a Successful Agile Coach? The role of an Agile coach is not rigidly linked to the time duration of the project being undertaken but on the contrary, it is totally a transitory role i.e. time deadlines are a bit flexible as long as the job is being done in the best possible manner with timely and feasible innovations. In the present day and age, the entrance criteria that is required in order to become a successful Agile Coach depends a lot on the chances of coming up with retrospective ways. Furthermore, these candidates must know how to operate an Agile tracking tool. Balancing the various aspects of different teams according to their different expectations is a must but not at the cost of your own values, ideals. Also, models can be made to understand and analyze the psychological aspects of different teams. If the need arises, then team dynamics might need a bit of tweaking and this must be handled with utmost care without deflating a few egos.
Main Objectives of an Agile coach. Differences Between Scrum and Extreme Programming. Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) are definitely very aligned. In fact, if you walked in on a team doing one of these processes you might have hard time quickly deciding whether you had walked in on a Scrum team or an XP team. The differences are often quite subtle, but they are important. I think there are four main differences between Scrum and XP: Scrum teams typically work in iterations (called sprints) that are from two weeks to one month long. XP teams typically work in iterations that are one or two weeks long. Scrum teams do not allow changes into their sprints. Once the sprint planning meeting is completed and a commitment made to delivering a set of product backlog items, that set of items remains unchanged through the end of the sprint. These are small and often subtle differences between Scrum and XP. How Agile Coaches Help Us Win—the Agile Coach Role at Spotify.