A very long time ago, I was coaching a Scrum team where a team member was on an hourly contract and was regularly billing 70-80hrs a week. Among many other ideas that I discussed with client, I advised my client was to transition this consultant away from an hourly contract to a full time with a full-time (40hours a week) contract. With this new arrangement, my client can recruit two full time consultants instead of one person at 70-80hrs week.
It is surprising that many “agile” teams still have a User acceptance testing phase within their software development lifecycle; if this doesn’t surprise you, then it surprises me. To be clear, I refer to an “agile” team as a team that has adopted one of the Agile methodologies i.e. Scrum, Kanban, SAFE e.t.c. as their chosen methodology to build their product. One of the agile manifestos reads “Customer Collaboration over Contract negotiation” and this implies that we are encouraged to Collaborate with the Customer while building the product.
Fix us Quick. The process of transforming an organisation to be Agile is a one that is ladden with continous learning and not a quick fix as some might make it seem. Organisations would often employ an Agile Coach for 3months to 1 year hoping that at the end of this period, the organisation would have completed their transformation journey. A great Agile Coach will always inform you that even after the engagement ends, the journey of Agile Transformation has not ended.
Usually when I join an organisation or team to help identify challenges with current processes and help the teams fix their processes, I would usually look for bottlenecks within the organisation. Once identified, bottlenecks are usually not difficult to eliminate compared to the effort that is required to ensure that behaviours that have introduced the bottlenecks are unlearnt.
A bottleneck can be described as a process within a chain of processes that reduces the overall capacity of the entire system due to the limitation of that single process.
