Assessment 1: 25%
- Activity: Write an article focused on ‘The challenges in establishing leadership in an agile software development project’. The intended audience for your article are recent business graduates who are new to
- Purpose: Demonstration of effective communication and interpretation of agile leadership concepts through reflection of learning material and personal
- Course Learning Outcomes: L05 Reflection
- Program Learning Outcomes: Business Communication and Leadership
- Essay Length: 1,500 - 2,000
- Moodle Submission Dates
- End of Week 8: 10th April (Friday 5pm)
- Please Note: You will need to undertake some research (reading/review/analysis) in developing your Plan for this research time in your personal calendar.
Assessment 1 Considerations
- In addition to your personal readings, and your own 3605 experience (team discussions and collaborations), consider the following when writing your article:
- Why is leadership in an agile project setting different than traditional software projects?
- What do ‘Agile Leaders’ do? / How do they lead?
- What are the challenges in establishing ‘Agile Leadership’ and how do they arise? what are the symptoms of poor leadership?
- Which of these challenges is most important for an agile software development team in initial stages of a project? How can you justify your answer?
- What are some solutions/lessons learnt that might help graduates new to agile?
- Note: ‘Agile’ does not = ‘Agile Scrum’, which is one approach of implementing
Helpful Articles from Scrum.org:
Assignment 1 Marking Criteria
- Logical and concise professional writing as per the Business Communication
rubrics.
- Quality and completeness of analysis of agile and leadership concepts; overall sophistication of Agile Leadership
- Evidence of reflection on your own 3605 Team experiences and how they relate to, and align with your understanding with Agile Leadership; soundness of self-assessment
- Completeness: missing submission due date leads to pro-rata mark
The challenges in agile leadership have not been studied as the opportunities it presents to an organization, in a study by Van Waardenburg and Van Vliet (2013) they concluded the main challenges which are faced by the agile leaders. Firstly, Management buy-in and understanding is the main challenge where low management involvement, lack of understanding of the agile philosophy and increasing landscape complexity. Secondly, the command and control culture of the organization is to be revised which is to a more collaborative culture in agile, changing the culture and the mindset is a vital challenge. Whereas, the agile leadership will inflict fear in the workers as the skill deficiencies will be more transparent and affect day to day operations. Furthermore, finding the right human resources which fit into this culture and lack of motivation from the staff makes it a concerning challenge for the leader.