Blog: Agile & Business

Agile Transformation: Don’t forget the Team

July 20, 2018

In Life and business one always asks oneself: what is real and what is not real?  What is important, and what is not important? This is hard. Well, parts are easy.  I am not interested in watching a Canasta game by random people (how many readers know the Canasta card game?), BUT I am very […]

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Velocity: How is it useful?

July 5, 2018

So, apparently, people are doing Scrum and not tracking their Velocity.  Why? One key reason: they do not see how useful it is. Here are some explanations. Helps the SM focus The Velocity is the key metric for the ScrumMaster (SM). The SM should increase the Velocity 100% in the first 6 months. (This is […]

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Velocity: Some preliminaries

July 5, 2018

It is important to know the Velocity of the team. What is velocity? Each team has a DOD (definition of done).  The Team has small stories at the top of the product backlog. When each small story, which has story points that estimate the relative effort, …when each story is “done-done” per the DOD, then […]

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Why not?

July 5, 2018

Rijon Erickson (sounds like “Ryan”) has an excellent post in LinkedIn. See here:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/rijonerickson/detail/recent-activity/ His (currently) latest posts asks for a DOR (definition of ready) and then a DOD (definition of done) (visually, he uses post-its).  The next post-it says “Simple (but) Not Easy”. To me, he is saying: We should be able to use […]

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Waterfall is done. Where is the debate now?

June 28, 2018

It is important to note that waterfall is over. Dr. Royce defined waterfall in 1970.  See his paper here. His son, Walker Royce, said that waterfall was over, and said we are on to iterative and incremental now.  He said this before we started calling it agile (before the Agile Manifesto was written).  See his […]

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Agile Transformation: What is it? Success? Metrics?

June 8, 2018

Last night at Agile Carolinas we had a discussion around the following topics. What is Agile Transformation? (really) What is success? (That is, what are the characteristics of a successful agile transformation.) What should the metrics be? We hope these notes are helpful to you. What is AgileTransformation? Below are the notes we took.  Many […]

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Our Fuller Picture of the Scrum Team

June 4, 2018

This is our basic picture of a single Scrum Team working on one release. (For example, this picture does not try to address ‘scaling’, if that were relevant.) The Basics Let’s start with the Product Owner, who is responsible for the quality of the Product Backlog. Then we mention the ScrumMaster, who is responsible for […]

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Agile Transformation – 2

June 3, 2018

I have already started talking, but want again to continue talking about an easy subject: Transforming a company to agile. Well, not so easy. But not as hard as some people think. ‘A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.’ We are too easily discouraged by what seems a daunting task. We too […]

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Scrum – Observations from Sutherland’s book

June 2, 2018

Alisha Parry recently read Jeff Sutherland’s book, “Scrum: The art of doing twice work in half the time.” Here are some of her observations that she shared with a work colleague. 1. Bugs take 24x as long after you wait to work on them. We have seen this even on Kronos, as we have previously […]

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Info for SurveyMonkey Survey

June 1, 2018

Intro This is background information for the public survey. You can take our survey here (Survey Monkey). The key purpose of the survey is to serve you better. The needs of the larger group of our contacts are diverse. Some want courses, some need workshops. Some people are looking as individuals, and some are looking […]

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