Monthly Archives: February 2016

Q: Becoming a good ScrumMaster

Q: “What is your advice on becoming a good ScrumMaster?” A: This is a good and difficult question. The difficulty is where to start and how best to express it. First, what is a good ScrumMaster? What makes one better than usual? You may think it odd, but the first thing I want to say […]

Scrum makes work a Game.

You know, of course, that Scrum is named for the Scrum formation in rugby. Generally, Takeuchi and Nonaka were inspired by the ‘rugby’ they saw in several great companies and how they created new product innovation. Sutherland and Schwaber read that article in HBR titled “The New New Product Development Game.” That was a key […]

Wide-Band Delphi Estimation for Business Value – 3

This is the third in a series of three.  See Part 1 and Part 2. ____________________________ How can we use the BV points? We could organize the Product Backlog strictly by BVPs, at least initially. In fact, I recommended this, to see patterns or to make any mistakes obvious.  Put the story cards in rows […]

What is Scrum?

Note: This is the first in a continuing series of posts re Scrum Intro. I am starting a series of posts to explain quickly what Scrum is. It turns out that Scrum is very simple, and yet difficult to explain concisely. The main purpose of this series is to give my course attendees a bit […]

“It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world”

I suppose we can all agree, after reading any newspaper, that the outside world is… mixed up, muddled up and shook up. Do we let ourselves see that this is also true of the world and the people immediately around us?  And maybe — ah! — even ourselves? Agile and Scrum are ways to work […]

Question: Explaining Impediments to the Sprint Goal that Happen

I received this email with a question: Hi Joe, I wanted to follow up and let you know how much I enjoyed the Agile class and how much I’ve enjoyed implementing it at my office. The team has really seen the improvement with their own eyes, and they are getting more and more brought in […]

Multitasking

I think the key goal of Scrum is to help the team maximize the Business Value from the team to the customers. Another subsidiary goal is to enable the team to focus. Focus is more or less the opposite of multitasking. Perhaps even more to the point, multitasking is one of the great destroyers of […]