Hello everyone,
lurking thru the archives I see quite some specific tool questions. Mine isn't one of those so feel free to ignore me if this question is OT here :)
I'm looking for ways to get started with agile methods. Currently there's Kanban on my mind. This is for a couple of reasons:
1. A lot of _positive_ information in operations teams is out there on the web. This (hopefully) makes it easier to accept
2. We (kind of) tried Scrum, it was decided on us, and got burned heavily. Actually we didn't do _any_ the things that make scrum work. We had to adapt to the the iterations of all the teams for which we do stuff, I'm pretty sure most of you can imagine that this time was...unpleasent at least.
3. I know Kanban from my old company :)
I'm not completely and totally sold as Kanban as the solution if there's something else to try tell me (Mind you: I'll probably call it Kanban anyway when talking to other people in my company) :)
Let me describe the situation:
I'm a team lead (and! sysadmin) for 11 people and we are working in a typical siloed enterprise environment. We have DBA teams, core teams, various teams for specific products and such. On the bright side: When talking personally to developers, product owner or project managers the relationship is usually quite good. The part that's not so bright is that very often we get tasks or requests thru channels that quite questionable (I'm working on that :).
Eleven people is very much on the large side but the really really good part is that we got everything. People that like to design processes, write code, like to talk, just do, firefight, design and a mix of all of those in any combination. In my opinion we have a huge potential, but we are struggling to be transparent to others because of the side channels which require tasks to get done and because we didn't have any clear direction in the last 1.5-2 years (or so). I'm pretty sure it's the standard setup for a siloed team :)
Personally I joined the team as a sysadmin 2.5. years ago as a sysadmin and operations manager (at our company: the guy that goes to all the meetings, gets screamed at, de-escalates and generally talks to ... demanding customers -- that's OK it's a part I actually enjoy). I've been thinking about Kanban for a while now, even before I got assigned team lead and now I'm facing the problem that I _could_ simply force everyone to try it. It's not the way it would work and I know how much I'd have hated to have to adapt my workflow.
So I'm facing 2 major problems:
* How do I sell it to the team?
Do you have any resources, hints, tips on how to sell it so that the acceptance is high. I know it won't work without getting everyone (or almost everyone) to actually want to try it? I'm not actually looking for textbook resources, rather than real world tips (DOs, DONTs)
* How do I sell it to the stakeholders?
My gut feeling tells me that the current situation (low throughput, somebody who can obviously be blamed) is actually something that people want. They, of course, don't actually want all the trouble that comes up but they know how to blame and that is what they don't want to loose.
I'm aware there isn't a standard recipe to follow here but I'd be grateful for any advice, also I don't want you do all the work I'm not a native speaker so I might have phrased that way but not ment it that way.
thanks,
Martin