Monthly Archives: September 2011

Creativity

A friend was reading Daniel Pink’s book Drive. And so I started reading it. I had this series of thoughts. First, I have for a long time thought that the key thing about our jobs is creativity.  Takeuchi and Nonaka call it knowledge creation, but to me it remains essentially the same thing.  And it […]

Defining Business Value // #2 Customer Smile

Imagine that you make a new camera, and after all that work — does it make the customer smile? Imagine that it is not Scarlett Johansson. Just a girl or young woman. Or maybe any customer who buys your new camera. You don’t make any profit on that camera, just she smiles. How do we […]

Nokia Test: Know your velocity (7)

Another installment in explaining the Nokia Test aka The ScrumButt Test. Background: There are far too many teams doing “Scrum, but…[eg, we don’t have a ScrumMaster]”.  This is not “full-out” Scrum, and almost always means that the team is not getting impressive results. My original blog post is here.  And I have other blog posts […]

Getting higher velocity! Take 2

I posted yesterday these listed below would lead, or at least could lead, to higher velocity (higher productivity) in your new product development teams: * Better retrospective meetings * Better impediment lists * Better business cases to management * More effective action (get approval and implement one ‘fix’ until you get results) * Better use […]

Getting higher velocity!

Higher velocity per se is not the end-all and be-all.  But it sure does help. Having trouble getting to hyper-productivity? Try these things.  Together. * Better retrospective meetings * Better impediment lists * Better business cases to management * More effective action (get approval and implement one ‘fix’ until you get results) * Better use […]

How does QA fit in?

Question from Liz:  The team and I are starting agile and we can’t get much info on where QA fits into Agile. Answer: First, I want to reiterate Jeff Sutherland’s concern (mentioned in this blog post), that the biggest problem is too many teams are not getting to working product (working software) within a Sprint […]

Release Planning: Business Value Points

One difference between what I recommend for Release Planning and what others recommend is Business Value Points (BVPs). What do I mean? First, is it useful to distinguish the Business Value (BV) of items in the Product Backlog?  Yes, of course. Why?  Many ways to explain.  One: Pareto says you can re-apply the Pareto rule […]

Latest Reading List – Books

We have a list of recommended books at LeanAgileTraining.com, here. In addition, we can recommend the following: A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising. Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) […]