Blog: Agile & Business

Essence – Other card sets

March 30, 2023

Ivar Jacobsen has put together cards that explain quickly many of the different agile “methods” or “tools.” (I would call User Stories a tool.)  Very useful. Here is a card set for User Stories: user_story_essentials_cards Here is a card set for “agile essential practices”: agile_essentials_practice_cards Enjoy! Use these with some of the Agile Games described […]

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Scrum Cards / Essence

March 30, 2023

Below is a link for the new version of the Scrum Cards (not planning poker cards) from Ivar Jacobsen. I recommend you download them. scrum_cards Really good stuff.  Fun to play with. I believe Jeff Sutherland has a lot to do with the creation of these cards, the wording, etc. Some of you may have […]

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Webinar on Scrum Guide 2020 on March 21, 2023

March 21, 2023

Hi all, We talked through the Scrum Guide. Some questions came up: Q: Will you tell us exactly how Scrum works? Hmm.  The Scrum Guide kind of does that.  And I added to  that.  Still I am not sure it was “exactly” or “completely”.  There is always a lot more to add and you all […]

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Brian Marick

March 1, 2023

Brian Marick was on of the 17 signers of the Agile Manifesto. His quote is: “An example would be handy right about now.” Here is a blog post about him (Brian), by another very interesting person: https://medium.com/@JoshuaKerievsky/example-guided-a-brief-history-f004ca19a96f Enjoy!

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The Spotify Model

February 24, 2023

Quick Intro As some of you know, Henrik Kniberg in (I think) about 2014 “wrote down” the then-existing “Spotify Model”.  How they worked then. It dealt with Scaling, but also with how a Team was organized.  And a bunch of other things. First, the way (the model) that Spotify was working then was in continuous […]

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Controlled-Chaos Software Development

February 13, 2023

This (the link below) is an article, written I think mainly by Ken Schwaber (and also by Jeff Sutherland). I have been told that many people contributed to the experiments and thoughts implied by the discussion in the paper.  This experimental development of Scrum has been stated by Sutherland and Schwaber in several (all?) of […]

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How to fix this Team? Diagnosis-2

February 5, 2023

This is continuing from a prior post. Here are some things we can look at.  If these were not done well at the beginning, they could be a cause of our problems now. Mission We must have a challenging mission. We must understand what it is, it must be a common mission that we all […]

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In medias res (“Into the midst of things”)

January 24, 2023

Here’s a famous quote of a man at the beginning of a journey. Or at least the story: In the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood where the straight way was lost. Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell what a wild, and rough, […]

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What if one Team member does not agree with the process? (eg, to do “scrum”)

January 20, 2023

For our work, we have two related ideas.  The Team and the team’s process.  (Yes, there are many other ideas, principles, values too.) The Team Most people, I think, like working on a pretty good team.  Often quite a lot. Of course, not every team is good. Some people need an adjustment time. See the […]

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Is Velocity Evil? (No.)

January 20, 2023

In a webinar today, someone said that Velocity is evil if equated with productivity.  I disagree.  And partly agree.   First some explanations (short, maybe too short for some): The Velocity of a sprint is the number of story points that the team “earned” (completed) that sprint. It’s the way we score in the game […]

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