I recently had the privilege of working with a great team which had an Agile Coach and a Certified Scrum Master from SolutionsIQ. Doing Business Intelligence (BI) projects with Agile takes a complete change of attitude and habits for those of us like me who spent the last decade doing waterfall based data warehousing and BI.
Here are a few things I learned from a recent project:
1. You can always learn more. The SolutionsIQ team provided great training to our developers, product owners and stakeholders. Some were receptive while others fought it all the way. Their team provided additional resources and one-on-one mentoring for those who wanted to learn more about specific subjects.
2. You can Agile your Agile rollout. Our coach, Chris, used a parking lot and user stories to develop the training for our team, based on priorities.
3. Do what works at the time. Our agile board went from Kanban, to Scrumban, to WTFban and back several times.
4.Project owners can sometimes crash the spring, so be flexible. When a PO is not fully on board they can often sabotage the team’s efforts. This can ultimately lead to a miserable workplace unless you confront the situation and find out their motivations. In one case the PO just had to change priorities and deliver a certain deliverable by a deadline he set with higher management. Once the team understands the new priorities, they can work together. Even in a tough work environment, I learned a lot.
5. Success drives adoption. Who can argue with delivering a great product?
Need training or a coach?
Call Chris, Craig and the team at SolutionsIQ.
Want to learn more?
Here are a couple of good books I’ve used as resources: