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An Innovation in Scrum Ceremonies: Peer Feedback Traditionally, the project manager or ScrumMaster is responsible for evaluating a team's performance. But peer feedback, when each member of a team picks another member, observes him or her, and then shares thoughts and suggestions about that other team member’s work, can also be very valuable to continuous improvement.
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Management Myth 36: You Have an Indispensable Employee An employee may become indispensable through arrogance or happenstance. These employees can cause bottlenecks and often prevent others, as well as themselves, from learning and growing professionally. "Firing" these indispensable employees sets your team free to work even when the expert is not available.
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Management Myth 35: Friendly Competition Is Constructive Competition between teams does not improve performance. In fact, the added stress may shift team members' focus from creating a quality product to self-preservation due to fear of failure. Johanna suggests managers emphasize collaboration between teams over competition.
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Myth 34: You’re Empowered Because I Say You Are Do your managers truly own their decision making or are they only "empowered" to come to you for approval of every idea and dollar spent? If you don't trust your team leaders to make decisions, how can you expect stakeholders to? Setting boundaries and defining expectations are two ways to empower managers and encourage initiative, giving them the opportunity to gain your trust.
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Slipping into ScrumBut ScrumMasters don't like to talk about their own troubles or failures, even though they say it’s good to fail. They don’t like to admit it happens to them, too. Sometimes it just creeps up. If you've started relaxing your Scrum principles and feel yourself slipping into ScrumBut, take hope: You and your team can recommit.
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What the World Cup and Agile Development Have in Common There are a surprising number of similarities between successful World Cup and agile teams. Both must be diligent in four areas in order to reach their “goals.” This article explores the parallels between the two for selecting the team, getting up to speed, consistency, and game plans.
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Five Agile Challenges for Distributed Teams The framework for agile development empowers the diverse environments of modern business. While some project teams can be collocated, many projects are undertaken by teams who are distributed geographically or organizationally. This article focuses on five challenges faced by these distributed agile development teams and provides some solutions.
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Myth 31: I Don’t Have to Make the Difficult Choices "Don't bring me problems; bring me solutions." Sound familiar? Sounds like a management cop out to Johanna Rothman. A primary purpose of managers is to help their teams perform to the best of their abilities, and that includes stepping up and making tough decisions to help solve problems.
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Management Myth 30: I Am More Valuable than Other People Just because you have a fancy job title doesn't mean you can manage your team members by bossing them around. Servant leadership is an important skill for managers, as the best managers are those who serve the people who work for them.
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Management Myth 28: I Can Standardize How Other People Work Johanna Rothman writes that organization-wide standards don’t help if management imposes them. If people ask for help with standards, then you can provide local help to each team. And if the teams are part of a program where you have one business objective common to multiple projects, make sure the program understands the problem.
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