Thursday, December 6, 2012

How to have teams Self Organized in Agile Framework - The Power Of Self-Organized Teams in Scrum Methodology

In agile software development methodology, there will not be less or no supervision. There will not be culture of reporting manager who assigns the tasks to you on daily basis and tracks the progress of the tasks and manager expects updates from their subordinates regularly. In agile framework no one is assigning you and tracking you the tasks. It’s all about the team members who play all the project management roles. The management would like to hear from the engineers/programmers regarding the project than just the leads. So, there is flat hierarchy in scrum methodology, the team members will deal with all aspects of the software including the software requirements to design, implementation and demos. May be in certain organizations, the Software Requirement Specifications are written usually by leads and design will be done by architects. However, in the scrum, team does not deal with huge set of user requirements at one go and does not create design for all of the requirements but requirement by requirement incrementally. And in all these project management activities, the team members are involved which is good for the team member since he/she will have entire idea on the user requirement that they are dealing with and the ultimate goal for the teams is to produce a working software at the end of each Sprint.

For the team to self organize in the environment described in above paragraph, a great mutual understanding between the team members is essential. For example, agile promotes methodologies such as Extreme Programming where two developers sit together and write software code. For this method to succeed, both members must feel comfortable with sitting together. It may so happen that even the software development frameworks like Agile say that Extreme Programming gives results and if team members are not comfortable with because of one or the other reasons, then its not simply going to work. Here the team is said to be 'Not Self Organized'.

In a self organizing team, teams will not just follow scrum rules but adopt quickly the required changes to achieve tasks in scrum methodology, the Sprint Goals. There is no concept of single member wins and rest of the team members fail or vice versa. It’s entire team that fails or wins at the end of PSI. In certain cases, if a team member is stuck in certain complex tasks and is not able to move forward to the next tasks, the other team members will quickly help the person and take required actions to come over the issue and move ahead. The mentality of individual contributor and not helping any other team members is not a good idea in a self organizing and cross functional teams because the team has a common goal.

Self organizing teams interact face to face than written communications or over the tools. There is no much dependency on documentation and the design but its all the team members who discuss the technical stuffs, challenges & clarifications and resolve them on the go. Teams will not wait for anybody's approval before doing something. Its the final working software that the required customers have to approve.

In summary, Complex software tasks have been resolved when many minds are combine thinking towards the solutions and this is possible only in a team that's self organized. There are several challenges before the team becomes a 'self organizing' team such as conflict of interests between two members, team members' experience level, and level of product/domain understandings. The team members need to change their mentality to adopt this framework. Scrum master should carefully observe team members behaviors and coach them as and when needed to bring the team to 'Self Organizing' team one and henceforth no coach, lead, supervision is required.

Tuesday, December 4, 2012

What Course to Select for Pre-University course? Study Career Path Ahead for SSLC Students

Right after SSLC, the students will have questions as to what courses to choose for PUC or 10 plus . Pre-University College offers different specializations (streams) for students to select. What stream to go for further studies, whether arts, commerce or science?  A big next question for most of the students who are just completing their SSLC.  Some students think the selection of these streams depend on the SSLC Exam results. Not at all. This is not true. It solely depends on the interest of students. In several cases, the students will have no idea on what they are going to study after their SSLC. They do not even think ahead in time until they finish the current study. In this post I'm going to talk about various options available in PUC courses and guidelines as to how the students & parents have to discuss and select the courses.

Broadly the PUC courses are categorized as Arts, Commerce & Science which will be of duration 2 years conducted by state education boards across India. In order to make an entry to any Indian Universities, the student has to pass through this course as well as another exam called CET (Common Entrance Test). Arts is Bachelor of Arts (B.A). Commerce is related to business management you will have subjects such as accountancy, statistics etc. Science has different options such PCMB, PCMC, CBZ where P-Physics, C-Chemistry, M-Mathematics, B-Biology, Z-Zoology & C-Computers (in PCMC). Science is a different story altogether compared to Arts & Commerce. Arts & Science are entirely different streams of study. And making a decision to choose these options plays base role in your entire career. This decision should be made 100% perfect with full confidence.

Selecting Science enables you to pursue Bachelor of Engineering(B.E) or Bachelor of Science (BSc) further after your PUC. Arts enables you to pursue Master of Arts (M.A) and then you can also go for B.A, LLB that relates to study of Law. Commerce helps you to pursue courses MBA, BBM etc further in your study career paths.

You can study what are different subjects of different streams and explore more and that is not a big deal. But the point is to think well ahead before making the decision to select the courses. Parents have to first understand their kids' interest and extra caution has to be taken not to force them to go for a particular course if kids are not at all interested in those courses. There are examples where students just followed their parents and stuck in between the course and did not do well in exams. If student is not interested in a particular course, all efforts to convince him about 'the' course will be in vain. If student is capable of doing the course however he/she is not aware of the future benefits then parents and student can discuss and come to a common understanding on the courses to take up.

Once the course is taken, initially it may be bit difficult to grasp and understand the subjects especially when it comes to science. But there is no reason to get demotivated.  Students should just keep going and making continuous efforts to understand the subjects and in few months, they get used to it. Even if students fail to score good marks in the first year of PUC, that should be okay. However, in the 2nd PUC, all possible efforts have to be made to understand the subjects and not just studying for the sake of scoring good marks.

A proper guidance is required here. Your goal is to get a job of your interest and students may want to go for job oriented courses. What course leads to what jobs should be well understood by the students and this would be the biggest motivation factor for studying. For example, if students opt to go with science, then they have to prepare for CET exam right from the beginning of 2nd year at least. CET is required to select engineering colleges. People who go for arts will go for M.A and they mostly go into teaching profession. So students need to make a right decision may be by taking help of parents and their teachers friends and take sufficient time to decide on this. 

Also see ,

Hope this post triggers some thoughts while choosing the PU Courses and studying the subjects.
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