Yearly Archives: 2012

Release Planning: Effort (1)

[For those who have not been reading here before, this is a continuation of a series that starts here.] Now we move on to Effort in Release Planning. *** The title of this blog post might be misleading.  Estimating the effort of a full Release per se is not quite what we want to do. […]

Agile’s broad adoption and mediocrity – what to do

Ken Judy has an excellent, although blunt, blog post here: http://judykat.com/ken-judy/agilescrumlean-broad-adoption-mediocrity-faul/ His main point maybe is that we do not have enough truly professional scrum (or agile) implementations. And why? Because we have implemented too broadly too fast.  Is probably the main reason, in his opinion. Some good insights.  Read them. *** Here are my […]

Six Myths of Product Development

Here is an HBR article : Six Myths of Product Development.  By Stefan Thomke and Donald Reinertsen. Here are the fallacies (or myths) in one list: High utilization of resources will improve performance. Processing the work in large batches improves the economics of the process. Our plan is great; we just need to stick to […]

Release Planning: Business Value

[For those who have not been reading before, this is a continuation of a series that starts here.] Now we move on to Business Value in Release Planning. As Yogi Berra said: “You have to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” If you are in […]

The Team and Introverts

I have several friends who are introverts.  And, as I get older, I recognize my own introvert side. And I appreciate it more, and accept it more. (The MBTI says I am an extrovert.)  It is to one introvert friend that I dedicate this post, a friend who has given me so many insights into […]

Agile Principles and Values

In the post linked below, Jeff Sutherland wrote, apropos the Agile Manifesto, a bunch of things about some key Agile values and principles.  Excellent stuff. As some of you know, I think it is essential for people doing agile or scrum to know and be in sync with the values and principles. What I call […]

Release Planning: Product Backlog

[This post is one in a series on Release Planning, which starts here.] After we complete the Vision, we must develop the Product Backlog. There are two parts to this. First, we must define the Roles to use in the User Stories. Second, we must write User Stories.  I call this second part a User […]

Referral Program

We have introduced a referral program. The idea is simple. We want to provide a token of thanks to those who refer a person to one of our classes. The token is a $25 Amazon gift card (we can substitute other gift cards of the same amount). So, it is not a huge referral bonus, […]

Public Impediment List – Again

I wrote the following post to a Scrum group. Perhaps you will find it interesting. It is lightly edited. And it is in response to another person’s post. *** Let’s talk about the impediment list more. Along the way I will mention some of the problems I see in real life. I find that most […]

What cocktail parties teach us

The title above is the title of an article today in the Wall Street Journal.  The subhead is: “Brain Is Wired to Focus on Just One Thing; Which Tasks Are Easier to Combine” It’s all about how we humans are built to focus. Multitasking is, well, inhuman.  A few monkeys can pretend to multitask, but […]