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Bill Wake on Support Escalations

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Managing an Agile Team

University of Virginia

4.7 (573 ratings) | 25K Students Enrolled

Course 3 of 5 in the Agile Development Specialization

While agile has become the de facto standard for managing digital innovation teams, many wonder if they’re doing it ‘right’. Twitter is full of jokes about how teams say they do agile but don’t ‘really’ do it. The reality is that getting the most out of agile is less about observing specific procedures and more about how a team focuses and measures their progress. Rather than just boring you with an accounting of agile methodologies, this course focuses on helping you better charter your team’s focus, definition of success, and practice of agile. While learning about agile mainstays like Scrum, XP, and kanban, you’ll also learn to help your team ask the right questions about how they’re working and facilitate good answers on how agile can help. As a Project Management Institute (PMI®) Registered Education Provider, the University of Virginia Darden School of Business has been approved by PMI to issue 20 professional development units (PDUs) for this course, which focuses on core competencies recognized by PMI. (Provider #2122) This course is supported by the Batten Institute at UVA’s Darden School of Business. The Batten Institute’s mission is to improve the world through entrepreneurship and innovation: www.batteninstitute.org.

Skills You'll Learn

agile product management, Agile Software Development, backlog management, Kanban, XP

Reviews

4.7 (573 ratings)

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SA

Jun 05, 2019

I've really enjoyed this course on Managing an Agile Team. Comprehensive with a mix of insights from industry experts, case studies and great instructions on best practices from Alex.

DB

Aug 01, 2017

This is an interesting course that provides critical information regarding collaboration with key stakeholders outside the scrum team. I use lessons learned in the course daily.

From the lesson

Building and Managing

This week we’ll dive into the jobs of building software and the core management jobs in running an agile team. Agile--and XP in particular--offers a rich body of work on specific coding practices. We’ll step through a few of the most prominent and discuss key linkages with the other concepts and practices you’ve learned. On the job of managing, we’ll dive deeper into what that means and what works in an agile context.

The Agile Manager6:27

Creating an Agile-Friendly Environment6:44

Skit: A Developer at Work3:15

Bill Wake on Self-Organization3:03

Bill Wake on Support Escalations4:39

International and Distributed Teams9:16

Skit: Retrospective #64:21

Agile Teams Meet Waterfall Processes10:17

Greg Cohen on Software Development10:10

Agile Product Teams Meet Big Customer5:10

Working with Big Customers: Keeping the Initiative5:21

Working with Big Customers: Accommodating Customer Variations6:15

Skit: Big Meeting with Marla2:52

David Chait on Using Data with Clients7:49

Taught By

Alex Cowan
Faculty & Batten Fellow

Transcript

I'm here with Bill Wake, a 15 year plus veteran of Agile, and major contributor and thought leader in the space. Thanks for joining us Bill. >> Hi, thanks Alex. >> Let's talk about support escalations. The team is trying to do Agile, and part of the premise is hey, we're going to get good flow time here. And you're going to have two weeks where you know what you're working on, you know what success is, and then boom, all of a sudden all these unexpected, two or three escalation, escalation development come into play, how do you manage that? >> Well, I think it's just if you're a team like a Dev Ops type team, you're doing development in operations, you're going to have those >> Those things happen, so in some sense, you're trying to be prepared for those as they come and just deal with them. The fact is if we're spending half our time on support this sprint, we're probably not going to be spending 100% of the time on developing new features that we had hoped for. >> You know over time you can kind of figure out the level at which things tend to run and different teams handle this different ways. I've seen a team that they sort of designate one person per sprint to say you're the first line for the team and if something comes in you deal with it if you need more help we'll give it to you but our team's assumption is you're pretty much going to cover it for this time and sort of setting a one team member expectation and adjusting the planning otherwise. As the teams get more In the continuous deployment, it becomes less of an issue that they're just taking whatever it comes next anyway. They weren't going to be spending two weeks, they were going to be spending a couple of hours or half a day or something and if it turned out the next thing is a support thing Then, let's do that. Or if we have to drop what we're doing then we'll do that and get it moving through. >> Let's talk about the relationship between those two things content wise. Is it hard for teams to look at support issues and get into the habit of saying, alright,well is there something we can do differently about the way that we're building the product or deploying it to users? That can reduce our support escalations versus okay, well, we thought we wanted to develop this new stuff. Is that a hard balance to strike? There's this idea of new development, and Is different than sustaining engineering. How do you find teams, strike the right balance so that they reduce the amount of support escalations they get? >> Well one thing is over time, we're trying to build a better level of quality into things, because we recognize that if we say something's done, but it really isn't because we have this kind of quality gap. And at some point we have to pay that back. And we can either make it better now and leave out the gap. Or we can leave the gap and then we have to >> To go support it later and, you know, it's interrupting it's a pain it's all that. Then, you know, we can see justification for doing things now to find out that. And, you know, the teams I know that do well on things, they have retrospectives or more ongoing continuous kind of things. And they try and explore. We have in the lead startup there's this notion of like a five wise analysis to say what caused this problem, or how did this occur? And really dig in to say let's find something now, we'll fix the immediate thing. We'll invest in up the chain of the wise and fill in to say, make this one a little better, a little better, a little better and then the things that go wrong all the time tend to be less frequent. Another one, the XP people that's been around a good long while as he calls it the street light theory and says if you have a town and there's, it's all dark and you're going to put in street lights. Usually the two places are you'll put street lights on busy streets because you get a lot of benefit from it for the people who are there all the time. And you put them in the streets that are maybe a little crime ridden. And. >> [LAUGH] >> They need a little more safety there and. And that of corresponds to what we're doing here as the team goes through you know the primary correspond to the defects, and as we hit and support fixing those defects we add the extra supportive tests and looking at our process and so on and you know kind of get the street lights there to make the flow go a little better overall. That's some great advice on managing the practical realities of what happens in development cycle versus what we plan. Thanks, Bill.

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