Pragmatic Practices

Delegation Poker

Delegation Poker is a group-based discussion and negotiation technique for areas of responsibility between a manager and his team. Originally conceived by Jurgen Appelo, we’ve changed and adapted it. Delegation of responsibility is not binary, i.e. “is the responsibility of the team” or “is the responsibility of the manager”. This is an oversimplification. Modern pragmatic…

Attributes of sucessful teams

Inspired by the book “5 dysfunctions of teams” by Patric Lecioni we have build a positive systemic model about crucial attributes for effective teams. The five steps form a process with backwards directed loops ensuring and fostering the steps before. Build Trust of team members into the team and the team leader (aka Psychological Safety),…

Investment Game

Getting priorities in a competing environment, e.g. regional Product Managers competing for R&D capacity Problem: PMs with local responsibility will hardly find good global priorities, because they are too focused (and maybe rewarded) on their own market results. Approach Every PM gets a number of „value chips“ representing the amount of influence of their region…

Planning Poker

What is Planning Poker? Planning Poker is used for the group-based estimation of sizes, usually the effort or complexity in development projects. This is exactly how the value (business value) of features or products can be estimated. But why “group-based”? It avoids one-sided views (swarm intelligence). It promotes structured conversations and discussions in groups. Also…

Team Flavors vs. Team Topologies

Team Topologies is an approach, which is public available through the same named book by the authors Matthew Skelton und Manuel Pais, published in 2019. It deals with the insight that (software) teams work better together if the type of collaboration is clearly defined. The approaches from Team Topologies and the P4 Team Flavors are…

Team Collaboration Poker

Team Collaboration Poker is used for group-based discussion and negotiation of collaboration between two teams. Collaboration between two teams can be very different and diverse. The card game is based on a typical situation of an application team and a service or component team, whereby the service or the component to be developed (or extended)…

Triage

The term triage comes from military emergency medicine to assess the urgency of emergency response. Cases are divided into three categories: The person is so severely injured that he or she is likely to die despite immediate action, the person is so severely injured that immediate action is necessary to enable his or her survival,…

Upswing Gravity Field

The Upswing Gravity Field is a wonderful visualization of priorities of Backlog Items. The upswing describes the added Value of items, the gravity describes the Effort that is needed for its realization. The priority corresponds to the quotient of value and effort. By using logarithmic scales, such as in the Fibonacci sequence, a double logarithmic…

Velocity

Velocity is a measure of done Backlog Items delivered per Timebox (Iteration or Cycle). It is used to provide a forecast of future done work. A pre-conditions is that the Team and the timebox are stable over time. Calculating Velocity It is possible to calculate the Velocity of a Team for a single Iteration or…