Scrum Alliance -Profile: Mike Lowery

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Mike is currently responsible for the line management of 18 project managers and is initiating an Agile transformation programme within the ACC focusing on project delivery, leveraging his background in working within the Agile world championing Scrum and Agile-related activities.

Prior to immigrating to New Zealand, Mike worked as a senior project manager (PM team Lead) at the BBC. His previous experience includes working for two big-5 consultancy firms, delivering local government IT projects in the UK and working in telecommunications manufacturing. He also spent just over six years in the Military, where adaptive, responsive planning to dramatically changing situations with immediate feedback (some of it hostile) is the norm.

Motto: No plan survives first contact with the enemy.

Recent Comments by Mike

On Empowering Teams: The ScrumMaster's Role: Very clear consise and informative, liked this a lot. My only disagreement would be "Directing the order in which tasks should be completed during a sprint", I think that in many cases it is important for the ScrumMaster to stress the relative imp...
On Leader of the Band: All of Mikes points above help master the role of Scrum Master and someone who does all of this will be an asset to their organisation. However i think there are a coulple of other attributes a Scrum Master needs. Strength - strength of will is ...
On Empowering Teams: The ScrumMaster's Role: John, That's exactly what i meant but articulated badly, I only try to give direction at the product backlog level.
On Empowering Teams: The ScrumMaster's Role: I also think Nicholas has a good point, A scrum master should try to remove impediments in a timely manner, we always seem to focus on the external for this and rarely internall. I try to "actively" facilitate rather then passivle listen and react...
On Missing Pigs: Mark, I would appreciate your thoughts on how to get the team to feel the meeting is for them and not a status report for the Scrum Master. Knowing that the Daily scrum is not "my meeting" (being the scrum master) made me concerned that the team ...
On Empowering Teams: The ScrumMaster's Role: Adam, can you split the backlogs into one per team? That would help, you can then put some integration items into all the backlogs (just in case they don't think of it).
On The Blue Peter Problem: Nigel, This is good stuff, I am currently working on issues exactly like this within my organisation. We have little problem with teams doing things or adopting practices. More issues with senior figures seeing as you say these processes as simpl...
On Scrum’s Neat, But I Have a Schedule to Meet: I did my scrum training with Mr Schwaber in London 2 years ago and what he said above is so right he might as well have sat next to me since then. (this next bit sounds like a marketing add for Scrum but it is true) I have recently finished a pro...
On Glossary of Scrum Terms: We have found that 2 week sprints work better for us as we can fit 2 weeks into our heads but 1 month is hard to think about.
On Leader of the Band: I mentioned having a thick skin in the context of all the additional requests for work outside of a sprint the team would get or relations with business senior management ("what the hell is a product burndown". Not in the your late take the blame ...
On Case Study: October 2007: I agree with Ken, some of the teams i have worked with have had the same issues (not doing the stand up when i was not there). I got over this issue by continually explaining that the standups were for them not a management check up. We used to ...
On Scrum and Group Dynamics: Jörgen, I really enjoyed reading this article but wondered if you could shed some more light on individual interactions as I have inferred from the text that as a team transitions to different phases all members do so at the same rate. This does n...
On Successful Sprint Reviews: I have asked all of my Scrum Masters to read this. Whilst it is stating the obvious, the obvious is rarely seen. Thanks.
On Writing the Product Backlog Just Enough and Just In Time: Great article mike, this will be a great resource for me to point people at when I can't quite get the message across. On the last project I ran we had all of the discovered product backlog items on the wall next to the dev team in the standup a...
On Production Support and Scrum: Great article Geoff it's an ongoing issue for many teams. When the teams I worked with came up against this issue, we did the following. 1. Reduced our velocity / capacity to have some support slack. 2. Major bugs / oversights were treated as n...

At a Glance

Mike Lowery

Agile Consultant

Certified:	CSM, CSP
Location:	Wellington New Zealand

Profile: Mike Lowery