Nikolay Gekht

Team Collaboration Scrum Management 3.0 Agile Coaching Motivation

Using Moving Motivators to Find Common Ground with Team

Occasionally I become responsible for fixing dysfunctional teams on their way to agile. Often these teams are entirely misaligned with project and company goals and consistently failed to improve the process. Aligning goals and motivations is always a kind of negotiation inside the team, as well as between the team

PMI-ACP Agile Certification Scrum Master PSM 1 PSM 2

PMI-ACP, PSM 1, and PSM 2 certifications, what do you need to pass, what does it mean to be certified?

First, I want to say a couple of words about myself. I come to these three exams relatively late, already having more than 20 years of practical experience as a project manager, program manager, and technical trainer. I chose to be certified after I start to teach quite a few

Agile Team Collaboration Scrum Backlog Management Product Ownership

Three Tips to Break the Ice between Your Development Team and Product Backlog

Helping agile teams to improve, I often saw one problem, especially with the teams recently migrated from old-school methods, such as RUP. In these teams, product owners are the only team members proactively involved in backlog management. Such situation contradicts to the Scrum ideology and dramatically decreases the team performance.

Product Management Agile Mindset Customer Awareness Client-Centric Development User Needs

Make Sure Your Team Knows the Client

One of the most significant barriers between the customer and the development team is the communication barrier. Good old mature development methods such as Rational Unified Process had the whole discipline and the designated role responsible for establishing clear and effective communication with stakeholders. Unfortunately, many Scrum teams that aren&

Remote Work Management Agile Leadership Scrum Team Collaboration Work from Home Productivity Virtual Team Communication

3 Mistakes to Avoid when You Send Your Employees to Work from Home

With the recent disturbing news about the coronavirus, many companies sent their employees to work from home. So quite a few of my fellow managers started to move through the terra incognita of managing remote teams. I recall my hesitation when my company started the agile transformation and switched to

Agile Development Team Collaboration Backlog Management FURPS Model Product Quality

Create Better Backlog and Engage the Development Team with FURPS.

FURPS is an acronym for requirements management, elaborated by Grady and Caswell decades ago. It stands for Functionality, Usability, Reliability, Performance, and Supportability. It helps to collect the complete set of requirements without overlooking essential non-functional needs and expectations of a customer and end-users. Many product owners and even whole