Clement Mutindori

Clement Mutindori ,got first impressions in early 2011,when  I was part of an Analytics project, with one of our clients that has gone for several months, and we were facing ever changing project scope that affected the team’s efficiency. The client had been interested in adopting agile in some of its projects, however our project was using waterfall. Our team had the opportunity to watch some new scrum meetings in session, attended agile workshops, and got access to agile materials.

Out of curiosity, I started researching more on different agile frameworks and was amazed, how we could cut some waste, that the team was experiencing on the project. One issues we were consistently running into, was constant change of scope, and high labor turnover, and lack of project documents update. This all resulted in effective collaboration and coordination, as team members were using information they thought was relevant to their assigned tasks/roles.After going through a number of materials I had a good understanding of the pieces and the basics of the agile/scrum process.

I got a breakthrough on my next project, though it was confusing at first, with all user stories being pushed to the scrum team. After working on a number of releases, and working closely with my teams as a Scrum Master and Product Owner(s) to practice Agile skills, not only writing user stories. With time, I managed to move from the traditional waterfall methodology mindset, learning from differnt product releases, sprint-to-sprint to communicate effectively with my team and other stakeholders. With time it become routine, to interact with team members, and follow processes and do our scrum ceremonies.

In my journey, it has been a roller coaster, as I have worked with different clients, whose views were diverse and in some instances, clients did not care about the process, principles but wanted results instantly on agile projects. In some cases, as a Scrum Master, I was assigned to write technical user stories, I could forgo the effort of facilitation and discussion, by being focused, on working with end users to understand what features they wanted, the teams to work on.

Some aspects of myt journey came into clarity a bit at a time, building trust with teams, giving them freedom, rather than feeling I needed to know it all, helped a lot. Following further, agile/scrum projects, it became a habit of conducting shorter meetings, and collaboration among stakeholders, and respect between team members grew.

My journey continues, with each team and client I work with. I still encounter many challenges and new opportunities, but I have gained confidence, and it is now a routine to know what works and what does not work in agile.