Monthly Archives: June 2009

Metrics & Velocity

I have received a few comments, both recently and in the past, that tell me some people are uncomfortable measuring velocity. And they are uncomfortable measuring the team. They are usually not that clear why they are uncomfortable.  Some feel it does not help. Let me state my position, which I believe is also close […]

Fun & Success – Learn Scrum

Fun & success? In the same sentence? “You are doing Scrum right if and only if you are having more fun. Serious fun.” “You are doing Scrum right if and only if you are having clear success.” How can these both be true? Pushing through to success is so stressful. Fun is light-hearted, like laughter. […]

Completing a Release

OK, so we have a known velocity in story points. And, having that, it is an exercise for a 6-year-old to figure out how many more Sprints until the release. Example: We have a velocity of 20 and the remaining stories in the backlog for this release have a total of 100 story points. So […]

Recommended Reading – June 2009

We have a list of recommended books, here. In addition, we can recommend the following: by John Kotter by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising by Taiichi Ohno by Frederick Brooks One of his famous quotes: “How does a project get one year late? One day at a time.” by Mugridge and Cunningham by Duvall, […]

Breaking the world record

My younger daughter has her last swim meet of the season tonight. I am excited (and still a bit affected by Father’s Day yesterday). When I talk about Agile & Scrum & Lean, I often refer to the Michael Phelps’ attitude. Not his attitude in South Carolina, whatever you may think of that. (Not that […]

What is Business Value Engineering?

I made a post about Business Value Engineering in AgileBusiness (Yahoo group) that I thought I would edit and then repeat here: QUOTE I have been asked to start a conversation about Business Value Engineering. So, here’s a start: What is it? It is a framework for continuously improving the delivery of Business Value to […]