Blog: Agile & Business

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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What is Scrum? – by Ken Schwaber

December 20, 2022

Here is a short paper by Ken Schwaber: whatIsScrum Willem-Jan Ageling (here) says that the paper is from 2003.  So, about 10 years after Scrum was invented. Schwaber and Sutherland (and others) had written many papers by then.  And the Scrum Guide (of 2009) had not yet been written. It is interesting to see the […]

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Fixing Agile Transformations – 1

September 26, 2022

Wow, what a big topic! Jon Jorgensen put up a post on LinkedIn.  Here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6978462442318135297/ (Jon has lots of good posts. Recommended.) I have not asked Jon exactly what he meant by his question.  I suspect a bit of mid-western sarcasm is involved. Here is my reaction, which is meant to be of some partial […]

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BVPS, SPs, Fun and Pareto – A few ideas toward better agile

August 12, 2022

Better Let’s agree on a few things: The most important thing (that we will discuss) is a better life.  For each of us, for the Team, for our customers, for the organization, and more broadly.  And, we think better agile will help that. There is no doubt in my mind that we, virtually every team, […]

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Commonalities and Differences

June 16, 2022

What is unavoidable — in Teams we work with people. And we work also with people outside the Team.  But let’s discuss that topic in another post. The next obvious thing to say is that people are complicated, each person by herself or himself, and in a Team of seven then, we get a lot […]

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Agile Carolinas: Requirements with Agile – How to become better

May 6, 2022

Agile Carolinas meeting: May 17, 2022 – at 5:30 pm.  IN-PERSON. We may try to also broadcast via Zoom.  ie, Hybrid.  (We need someone to help with that.) [Links to be added]   *** Unclear requirements are always a problem.  Always hard in a way. So, let’s discuss how we are doing “requirements” in an […]

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More, Better…

April 27, 2022

Goethe wrote at the very end of Faust: Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis Das Unzulängliche, hier wird‘s Ereignis Das Unbeschreibliche, hier ist‘s getan Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan (For those drawn to this quote, see: https://rvgeiger.blogspot.com/2015/01/das-ewig-weiblich-zieht-uns-hinan-or.html) One line in English:  “The unachievable here comes to pass.” It’s a very famous passage in German literature, […]

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