Monthly Archives: February 2014

Impediments – Raleigh-Durham Feb 2014

I really want to advocate again that we must make the impediments visible in a public impediment list.  And never stop aggressively attacking them.  If you prefer to call it ‘our list of things to improve on,’ I won’t arrest you. Here’s the list the group made in this class.  They are not on order, […]

Question: More on Agile Contracts

Gabriel asks: Can you suggest a few relevant papers on Agile contracts? I am interested in both the ad-hoc, non-commercial agreements, to maximize, based on Pareto law naive application, the output of PO-development team through collaboration, and the commercial agreements that best support such an objective. I read this: http://www.agilecontracts.org/agile_contracts_primer.pdf but I would like to […]

Agile Contracts – The Poppendiecks

Here are some additional resources for Agile Contracts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ajwxtalBKE Above is a good presentation by Mary Poppendieck about ‘agile contracts’ via video. From 2011. http://www.slideshare.net/AgileLietuva/mary-poppendieck-agile-under-contract And above is a slide deck of a presentation by Mary Poppendieck in 2011. Not the same one as the video. And be aware that the Poppendiecks have done many […]

Open Agile Adoption

Open Agile Adoption is an ‘open’ approach to adopting and evolving agile in a given company or group. By ‘open’ we mean that we are engaging the people (who will be changing) in designing the change. We do not mean total chaos.  Management might establish some ‘guardrails’ (eg, we will do Agile as defined in […]

Impediments – Charlotte in-house course

These impediments were identified (some I think are redundant).  Note that some are expressed in quite a different way (eg, some negative, some positive). Dups may indicate that an issue is very important. Legacy Code impacts Allocate the correct people to the team Address Env Issues Define scope / business ask (better) Multiple decision makers […]

Joe’s real agile contract

Adela asks: “Please send me some information [on] the details contracts shall contain [for] those projects where the methodology is Agile.” To talk more clearly, let’s imagine a situation.  Imagine you are a ‘development firm’, ie, in response to external client needs, you develop custom software. Imagine that the client contacts your firm. He knows […]

Scaling Workshop Montreal

I am really excited about the Scaling Workshop Dave Muldoon and I just led in Montreal. Dave had mentioned this before, but it struck me how each person’s problems are different. And, even if they are somewhat similar, they need to be prioritized differently. We had some discussion of ScrumPLOP.org. We discussed some patterns for […]

Agile Contracts: Another resource

Here is an additional resource from some smart people: http://agilecontracts.org/ More specifically: http://www.agilecontracts.org/agile_contracts_primer.pdf This is from Craig Larman and Bas Vodde’s book, Practices for Scaling Lean and Agile Development. Note: Be careful when studying ‘agile contracts.’  Often different authors or thinkers or speakers have very different goals or situations in mind.  One might think they […]

Question: The Basics of Agile Contracts

Melinda asks: “How can SCRUM/Agile Methods be effectively leveraged for responding to RFP/proposals for Fixed Price & Fixed Date contracts especially when the Scope (i.e., Product Backlog) is more adaptive to change? When would CRs be required, if at all? How can we help customers understand and be confident that they will receive greater value […]