Monthly Archives: December 2013

Courses We Offer

We offer many courses and workshops: Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course – This is the basic course, which I recommend for everyone and for teams. We now almost always include a 1-Day workshop (on Agile Release Planning). I strongly recommend this. Occasionally, I offer a 2-Day workshop as well. Intermediate Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) course […]

New Scaling Workshop

We have added a 1 day workshop to many of our courses.  Dave Muldoon and I will do the Workshop.  Dave has years of experience scaling in a large multinational corporation, and with other large organizations. What is it: The workshop reviews quickly the several approaches to scaling in the community now: SAFe, LeSS, DAD, […]

A song for the season

In the western world, this is the season of peace. One of my favorite hymns from this time of year is ‘O come, o come Emmanuel’.  Emmanuel means ‘God with us.’ Here is a version by Linda Ronstadt: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fsqk9FOBtuo Below are two verses from the lyrics: O come, Thou Day spring from on high, and […]

Impediments – Charlotte December Course

I am an advocate of a public impediment list.  The ScrumMaster must always be working on the top impediment until the Team is perfect (and it is never perfect). The value of that can be seen when the Team has doubled (or increased) their productivity or velocity. The Team must be creative and aggressive in […]

Agile Contracts

Jeff Sutherland did a presentation at Agile 2013 that I think everyone should read and think about.  And read and think about again. Here is the slide deck: http://jeffsutherland.com/Agile2008MoneyforNothing.pdf

Agile Contracts – Question 1

Adela asks this question: Imagine we have a brand new project. And we must bid on it, and we want to use the agile-scrum method.  How should that work? This is a good question.  I will answer it quickly here. Too quickly.  I have partly answered it in my book, Agile Release Planning. And partly […]

What if Scrum is not working for you?

I was speaking to a smart guy who had taken (some while ago) my CSM course.  We were both waiting at the Cluj (Romania) airport. He made me think about this problem. The first thing to say is: Scrum is not a panacea.  It requires hard work.  Often people expect Scrum to magically make things […]

Impediments – Charleston

We just completed a CSM course and Agile Release Planning workshop in Charleston.  Here are some of the impediments they identified. They have duplications and they are not in any particular order.  In my opinion, the list should also include automated testing, better continuous integration, and better automated integration/regression testing.  These were issues discussed later […]

The CSP is in demand…

We have a problem in Scrum. First, we do well to call it an opportunity rather than a problem.  We have more opportunity sitting on the table that we have not yet grabbed.  Scrum, in general, can help us get a LOT more improvement than we have gotten. There are many root causes behind this […]