One approach I want to try one day is described here in the Shape up book. It's free and takes around 2-3 hours to read cover to cover. The idea I liked the most is that it made me shift from "How much effort and time we need to solve the problem" to "How much effort we are willing to spend on solving the problem, then find a solution that matches that 'hunger', 'willingness'". It makes simplifications of solutions viable.
But the books is full of gems, so my two sentence overview doesn't do it justice. Read it here https://basecamp.com/shapeup
With that said, I don't expect any manager to allow us to try out. People love that they can hear people every day that they are all very busy.
My current Scrum experience is from a large retail company. Our mobile app team of ~8 devs tries to keep up with the web team of ~50 devs (or even more, I just started and we work remote, I have no clue about the exact numbers).
The schedule, roadmap is mapped out for at least the next year.
Then, the Scrum doesn't make any sense. We can't decide what's important for the user. We can't work on bugs (that makes the lives of our users miserable) because we work on big feature launch X, and if we don't finish, it will jeopardize big migration Y in 2 months, and then it'll make big relaunch in Country Z impossible in 4 months.
It's waterfall with two-week crunch times and daily standups. And our ratings in the app store are constantly declining. But hey, at least we are on time, no matter how terrible our app is, in Jira it says it's shipped so don't whine about software and product quality.
During my whole career (about 5-ish years), I didn't find a place where a standup every day made sense. I think two or three sync-sessions per week would be perfect. Daily standups just made anxious, nobody listens to the others, you either say too little or too much, and the original promise of standups just didn't match my every day experience: we never found blockers we wouldn't have found otherwise, etc... In my opinion, pair/group programming (2-3 ppl) is thousand times better.
But the books is full of gems, so my two sentence overview doesn't do it justice. Read it here https://basecamp.com/shapeup
With that said, I don't expect any manager to allow us to try out. People love that they can hear people every day that they are all very busy.
My current Scrum experience is from a large retail company. Our mobile app team of ~8 devs tries to keep up with the web team of ~50 devs (or even more, I just started and we work remote, I have no clue about the exact numbers).
The schedule, roadmap is mapped out for at least the next year.
Then, the Scrum doesn't make any sense. We can't decide what's important for the user. We can't work on bugs (that makes the lives of our users miserable) because we work on big feature launch X, and if we don't finish, it will jeopardize big migration Y in 2 months, and then it'll make big relaunch in Country Z impossible in 4 months.
It's waterfall with two-week crunch times and daily standups. And our ratings in the app store are constantly declining. But hey, at least we are on time, no matter how terrible our app is, in Jira it says it's shipped so don't whine about software and product quality.
During my whole career (about 5-ish years), I didn't find a place where a standup every day made sense. I think two or three sync-sessions per week would be perfect. Daily standups just made anxious, nobody listens to the others, you either say too little or too much, and the original promise of standups just didn't match my every day experience: we never found blockers we wouldn't have found otherwise, etc... In my opinion, pair/group programming (2-3 ppl) is thousand times better.