Yearly Archives: 2021

What is the problem set?

You have probably heard the recommendation: solve the right problem. Often in new product development, we think of this as the customers’ problem. And then we have ideas, from Lean and elsewhere, such as: root cause analysis – the idea that the customer presents with a symptom(s), but the root cause is not so obvious […]

The illusion of control

Daniel Mezick has a good post in LinkedIn today: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielmezick_the-command-and-control-military-gets-agile-activity-6761443011659370496-itMo About the illusion of control, and the idea that control is an emergent property.  (There’s that darn word emergent again.)  See the article he links to: “The ‘Command and Control’ Military Gets Agile.” https://www.infoq.com/news/2010/06/c2-military-gets-agile/ *** Some quick thoughts. Of course it is an illusion that […]

New “Refresher” course policy

We are introducing a new policy. For a very low fee, you can take ANY course again. Rules: It must be a course or workshop you have taken before (eg, per Scrum Alliance).  And that we give Any instructor.  You could have taken the original course with any instructor. You must have completed the original […]

When NOT to scale

We had a great webinar yesterday on this topic. We defined scaling (which has many definitions) as 3 Teams working together on the same “product”.   Here are the drawings and some related slides: Not_Scaling_Jan_2021_2021-01-26_15.01.41 This is PDF of drawings on the iPad Not Scaling – 4 ideas V2 PDF from Keynote   Enjoy!

Webinar: Two Patterns for Managers in Agile

This is another in our Webinar Series. Date: May 27, 2021 (Thursday) Time: 2 pm EDT, 1 hour. Link: (to be added — where you can register) We will discuss two patterns for how managers should interact with Team. For senior managers: The Executive Action Team. Many people have had this idea.  Jeff Sutherland prefers […]

Some tools for Agile

Here are 4 tools I have been using in my courses.  And recommend, for you to use with your Teams. Microsoft Teams I am about to start using Microsoft Teams. They have added break-out rooms.  I think they work well enough for me. Lots of integrations.  But they make it easy (fairly easy) to start […]