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Anti-Patterns of Product Owners – Part-1

One of the most important roles in an Agile Project is that of the Product Owner (PO).  The Primary responsibility of the PO is to represent the Business, prioritizing business requirements for delivery.  This often means that the PO is the one who decides what the Squad does in a Sprint.   However, it does not mean that the PO tells them how to do it, when to do it during the sprint, and which team member should do what.  Sadly some POs go beyond their key responsibility and start managing the team and the project – the Project Managing PO!  These POs find it difficult to move away from Project Management and adopt an approach of trust, collaboration, and empowerment – which is pivotal in an Agile context.

This article highlights the PO anti-patterns, describes the repercussions of these, and towards the end suggests a few tips to avoid them.

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Agile Transformation Challenges: 6 Missteps That Slow Down Change

The road to a successful Agile transformation is not an easy one. As the number of organizations deciding to embark on an Agile journey increases, how many of them are successful? VersionOne’s 13th Annual State of Agile Report states that 97 percent of respondents surveyed practice agile to some degree within their organization. However, only practicing the methodology to some degree, is one of the most detrimental mistakes organizations make, hindering the chances of a genuinely successful transformation. 

The number of obstacles that stand in the way of organizations achieving desired results is exponentially higher than those faced by start-ups. Some challenges, like size, are beyond their control. However, there are common challenges that enterprises can avoid if they know what to look for. 

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Agile Transformation — Challenges and Path to Success

Agile Transformation

Agile transformation today is considered as a necessity as the traditional waterfall model has failed conclusively. Agile has led to phenomenal efficiency and has become de facto standard in the IT landscape today. Agile transformation is part of every organization’s technology roadmap with dedicated teams. Though numerous case studies are proving its effectiveness and great turnaround saving big businesses, it is still clouded in doubtfulness due to the demands that are less understood and wrongly enforced. This white paper addresses common pitfalls that were encountered during project execution particularly in an onsite-offshore / onsite/best-shore model and the learnings. If properly done, this could be a key game-changer that will not only push organizations towards a consistent growth path but also serve the society by reducing wastage and getting more things done in less than half the time.

Key Aspects of Agile Transformation

The benefits of agile transformation are

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Why Agile Fails: The PA-SA-WAKA-DA Theory

It is funny to notice that, more often than not, we only hear the good stories in each segment of our lives. That applies equally to Hollywood, where we only get to see the shining stars, but ignore the struggle that goes behind it, or any successful Agile project, where we see and relish the success, forgetting the relentless effort by a dedicated team. Does success cover the entire story? Of course not! There is a very dark side as well — which is often not too exciting to hear or encouraging to know — but very insightful if you wish to learn what not to do to avoid failure.

It is repeatedly presented that only 42% of Agile projects succeed in truly being Agile. The other 58% struggle (50%) or fail (8%)! So, what are they doing differently that keeps them from success with Agile? This is interesting to know — as doing or being Agile, may sound different, but in reality, they are very closely-related, only differed by the span of its usage.

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Reasons for the Failure of Agile in Organization

We often talk about Agile and its benefits in an organization. Everybody knows that using Agile will bring a lot of long-term benefits which can be related to profit, better team, better quality of software, and lot more. Do we ever wonder, though, what the success rate of Agile projects is, and why Agile projects fail?

1. Lack of Management Support

Agile cannot be implemented without the support of management. Let’s discuss two different organizational scenarios for management support in detail: