Yearly Archives: 2013

CBA: new Maserati vs. used Lexus??

Ladies, Please forgive me. I have to make an obvious point with some guys. And you know how guys can be. Sometimes you have to make it really obvious to them. *** We need to know the BVPs (business value points) and the SPs (Story points) of each story, so that we can do CBA […]

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Why I prefer ScrumBan to Kanban

I have spoken about why I like Lean and why I like ScrumBan, a combination of Scrum and Kanban. Some people prefer ‘Kanban’, as it is being called in the software development community.  Sometimes: Kanban Method. To be honest, I think I know what Kanban is in Lean Manufacturing. But I am unsure what ‘Kanban’ […]

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Story Points rather than hours

Jeff Sutherland has a great post about this, here.  A must read.    

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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.  […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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‘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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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