Monthly Archives: October 2014

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.  […]

9 Key Statements about Estimating

I won’t explain them now, but here’s the summary… Estimations can be mis-used by some managers (and have been).  Watch out! Customers want some kind of estimate. (Ask for details about the kind of estimate they want.) There is a trade-off between the time it takes to estimate and relative accuracy.  Keep it shorter (usually) […]

Can the Team promise a date?

I think this is an important question. To promise? Umm.  What does a promise mean?  Can Joe Namath promise a Super Bowl victory? One song lyric is: “Promises, promises, I’m all through with promises, promises now.”  Many a song about broken promises.  One of my favorites is the Eric Clapton upbeat blues song: “Promises”.   Check […]

Public Impediments – Charleston Oct 2014

Until you are perfect, you have impediments to fix. Here are the ones identified quickly in the course in Charleston. From an Agile point of view, I am not sure I would agree all are impediments. Team member looking for other work Lone wolf attitude with some team members Changing technology Lack of specific skills […]