Monthly Archives: May 2013

Joe’s Unofficial Scrum Checklist V1.3

It is Memorial Day weekend and time for another edition of Joe’s Unofficial Scrum Checklist. (smile) No, not really. Someone in class asked what he could use to check if his teams were using Scrum well.  I suggested: The ScrumButt Test – 8 points. “A list summarizing Scrum” (V.5)  – 2 sides of one page.  […]

PO Impediments – Charlotte May 2013

Several things to say about impediments: Few teams have a public impediment list. They should. Few teams are aggressively attacking impediments, as I see it. (I guess this depends on what one means by aggressive. I mean full time alienation of impediments. Mercilessly.) We must use impediments, and continuous improvement to get higher velocity in […]

Predictable project or innovative project?

Mike Cottmeyer spoke at Agile Carolinas last night. He said many good and useful things. One thing he talked about is this: What kind of project do you have?  At one extreme, do you have a project that is pure innovation?  Or, do you have a project that it completely ‘predictable’, and the main problem […]

A purpose for Agile

In general, it is useful to do the most important things. Not the things we are most sure about.  Not the things that we can do well.  Not the things we can predict well (or better). But, we should do the most important things, usually one at a time. Yogi Berra said: You have to […]

‘They still want us to deliver too much in too little time!’

In a class, we had a large group of people from one company.  The company is doing or getting close to doing mostly Scrum. The managers and the Board have not attended a Scrum class. In any case, ‘management’ is still asking the Teams to deliver too much in too little time.  Both say the […]

Question: How to order Stories in the PB

Question from a Class Attendee: A question, about ranking user stories. In the recent Scrum Master course, you indicated we should rank stories in the PB (Product Backlog) by Business Value and do them from the top down. In the Product Owner course back in 2011, you had us calculate R = BVP / SP […]

ROI for Scrum Training

Does Scrum Training give a good ROI? Well, of course, that depends. Mainly, whether the Team (the full Team) takes an aggressive attitude toward improvement.  So, as you could guess, we train the attendees that a key job is to get continuously better.  We set the expectation of doubling velocity in the first year. Let’s […]

Public Impediment List: “We don’t want to see the bad news.”

The Scrum Guide does not mention it, but I strongly advocate a public impediment list. The simple idea is: visual management, and single piece flow off the ‘top’ of the list.  That is: Make the team’s impediments visible and visual.  Prioritize them. And then actively work them each day.  With at least one meaningful impediment […]

Intermediate CSPO Course

Scrum is, in a way, simple. But I think that, for many reasons, doing Scrum well requires continuous study. For one thing, we need to do the practices in harmony with the values and principles behind lean-agile-scrum.  Also, we are always forgetting the values and principles. But there is more to it than that. You […]

Special Offers: Today thru Sunday

Today thru Sunday, for that limited time, we have a special promotion on this course. Intermediate CSPO + Workshop in Charlotte, May 21-23. 10% off to members of the local Agile or PMI groups. (Or those who join today.) Details are here or here. Today thru Tuesday, for that limited time, we have a special […]