Are You Ready to Scale Agile? 

You are an Agile evangelist. You have championed the shift to Agile at your organization and have coached several teams successfully. Your organization is delivering quality product faster to your internal and external customers. But there's still a struggle to coordinate across different parts of the organization. And you get pulled into meeting after meeting to coordinate across teams. As a result, your most successful teams are expressing frustration with each other and, and now, quality has slipped. Something has to change. 

Last year I switched to grocery store canola oil to lubricate my chainsaw bar. I add Oyster mushroom spores into the oil so that they are dispersed while I cut. This method was developed by Paul Stamets of Fungi Perfecti and discussed in his book Mycelium Running. There doesn’t appear to be a commercially available product; however, by making it myself at close to the cost of conventional petroleum-based bar oil (~$15/gal), I improve my forest and should have some convenient forage this fall. I am still refining the process of infusing spores into canola oil, but if you are curious to try it, I’d be happy to swap notes.

Project managers have a wide range of responsibilities when working on a project: they are in charge of planning the project, creating a schedule and timeline, executing each phase, managing budgets, serving as the liaison among all stakeholders, and also troubleshooting and maintenance in addition to other activities. As such, a Project Manager(PM) must be very organized and detail-oriented. A PM also needs to have great people skills because, at the end of the day, this person is responsible for leading the team and communicating with all involved parties.

It’s a dream we all have: To be the founder or early employee in a company so disruptive that it has a real chance to hit it big. With success comes prestige, security, respect, and of course, lots of money. 

How can you set up your small business to become the next big thing?

As organizations continue to scale Agile practices, our team at Praecipio Consulting is frequently asked which Atlassian product will best support the effort. Principal Consultant, Brian Nye, put together a great webinar describing the differences between Advanced Roadmaps for Jira (formerly known as Portfolio for Jira) and Jira Align. As Praecipio Consulting has expanded our Jira Align practice (in addition to earning a Jira Align specialization badge), we'd like to take a moment to compare and contrast these products to help guide you in making the right decision for your organization. 

One key component of managing your Atlassian applications is managing their upgrades. Upgrades can present a daunting and significant time investment for many companies, generally involving applications, add-ons, and integrations, with a large number of users dependent on the success

You know what upgrades are and that they're important. So why am I talking to you about them? Imagine the scenario: you're busy, you haven't had a chance to check in on the latest Atlassian security vulnerabilities, and you've missed the email updates based on your subscription. 

It's no secret that here at Praecipio Consulting, we love Atlassian, we love Agile, and we especially love using Atlassian tools to Agile ends. The Atlassian suite (Jira, in particular) has been built to reinforce a lot of the concepts that are core to functioning in an Agile way, which is one of the many reasons that 83% of the Fortune 500 use it. So, setting up Jira is often one of the first steps companies take when they want to adopt the Agile framework. 

Atlassian has always held the concept of the team in high regard. As you may know, even their stock ticker is TEAM. And with many organizations pushing to Atlassian Cloud from their Server or Data Center solutions, it's no wonder Atlassian is removing barriers to entry for first-time users and admins. Whether you choose Standard or Premium, Jira Software adds the ability to create next-gen projects.

Level Set of Terms

Before we dive into today's blog post, let's get familiar with these terms:

• DevOps: A mix of cultural and technology practices to improve the use of software and technology-servicing customers.

One of the most important decisions that your organization has to make with regards to your Atlassian applications is which hosting option you'll use. Not only will you will want to review the differences between Cloud, Server, and Data Center, but unless you are using Atlassian's Cloud platform, you'll also have to make key decisions about infrastructure. Praecipio Consulting offers Cumulus Cloud, our managed hosting solution to help make your decision easier.