Yearly Archives: 2014

Scrum Master Course Toronto + Certified Scrum Toronto + Workshop – Impediment List

Certified Scrum Toronto | Scrum Master Course Toronto + Workshop Impediment List Here is what the Toronto course identified as impediments.  Not in any order (although understood that it must be ordered). Overlooking risks Big scope Team competence Too many defects Team changes Processes not clear Product owner involvement Under estimated Requirements not clear Requirement […]

Making Change Happen

How do we make change happen? First, this is an interesting and somewhat difficult question. No one knows the complete answer. Change does happen, and people ascribe causes to why the change happens (or does not happen). The facts are very messy so it is hard to be sure, and hard to know if we are sometimes lying […]

Managers : Impediments

It should not be confusing how to manage in Scrum (agile). Let’s put a scope on this. We are talking about the management of innovation, using Teams. Not the management of BAU or regular production or whatever your firm calls that. I am less sure these principles (below) apply in those cases, but I do […]

Agile Adoption: Two Styles Contrasted

Imagine a smallish organization with 10 Scrum teams (or what will be 10 Scrum teams).  I want you to be thinking of a relatively uncomplicated situation. Imagine that you offered two ways to implement agile. Let us assume that we believe that agile will lead to better lives for the workers and better lives for […]

Avoid an Agile Adoption that’s ‘Meh’

There are many ways to adopt Agile or Scrum. And in a sense, it is true that each organization adopts agile in it’s own way. One broad set of patterns is ‘bottom-up’.  This means that it starts with one team, who finds out about it and starts doing it, and then it spreads.  Without official […]

Strategy as Distributed Phronesis – Nonaka

Some of you will recognize this name.  He is one of the two men who wrote The New New Product Development Game, which directly lead to the creation and naming of Scrum. Here is the slide deck on “Strategy as Distributed Phronesis.” Sounds like a mouthful, but it has some great stuff . I think […]

What does the Executive Team do in Scrum?

In an earlier post, we described an Executive Team in a smallish company (aka an oversight group in a larger company).  And we described a simple situation.  For example, the oversight group is responsible for 8-10 initiatives. Or, basically, 8-10 Scrum teams.  For now, let’s make it simple, and imagine that each Scrum Team is […]

Why are we doing Agile?

We just had Southern Fried Agile in Charlotte.  See SouthernFriedAgile.com I have 5 take-aways.  For today, the first one. Why are we doing this? We are not doing Agile for Agile’s sake. We are doing it because we think it will help. And the most important people to help are…. well, first, everyone.  Everyone at […]

Impediments – Charlotte – Oct 2014

This the list that this class identified: Indecisive Little stakeholder engagement Started development late LOB changed strategic direction Assumptions Lack of Test Environment & Data Undefined risk Lack of communication Missing requirements Too many bugs No DOD Time constraints (this is not yet a actionable impediments…but an issue for analysis IMO) Backing into dates Unreasonable […]

3 Ways a Scrum Team is Managed

We think it is reasonable to manage a Scrum Team in at most 3 ways.  (OK, we mention also a fourth.) (Context: To simplify, we assume a smallish firm with teams that are mostly working independently.  There are lots of other contexts.) There are two main rules. A. Do NOT over-manage or over-control the Team.  […]