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Aligning Individuals and Teams with the Company Strategy

How do you ensure that individuals and teams are aligned with the company strategy? How do you validate your company strategy?

The answer is typically to have good data. When we measure outcomes, our organization becomes more transparent.

Challenges with Good Data

Good data is hard to find though. The larger an organization is, the more complicated it becomes and the harder it is to associate cause with effect.

Reflecting the Pain of Unrealistic Deadlines

Unrealistic deadlines can be highly stressful. One approach to dealing with them is to reflect the pain back.

Lessons Learned from Organizing a Scrum Master Community of Practice

I helped to organize a large (60+) Scrum Master community of practice. Some of the lessons learned include:

Acceptance Criteria

Acceptance criteria are story-specific requirements that must be met for the story to be completed. They are a technique for adding functional detail to user stories. Acceptance criteria are often added during backlog refinement or during the sprint planning meeting.

Balancing Front-End and Back-End Workload

Sometimes, a team finds themselves with requirements that require a lot of back-end development and a small amount of front-end work. If the team has specialist front-end and back-end developers, then it may be tricky to balance the workload.

Establishing a Good Relationship with an Offshore Team

If you want to establish a good relationship with an offshore team, then I would suggest some or all of the following:

Using a Kanban Board for Synchronization

A Kanban board helps developers synchronize their work.

Scrum teams take user stories into sprints.

For many teams that is the end of the conversation. They do not need anything else to describe the work they are doing and the requirements they plan to do in the future.

For other teams, particularly those with a long product backlog, it may be beneficial to use other terms for requirements. Terms like 'epic' and 'theme'.

It is tempting to think of sprint retrospectives as a part of the reporting process. A chance to let people outside of your Scrum Team know what you are discussing and how you are improving.

There are dangers with this approach: