Blog: Agile & Business

Honesty and Scrum

November 13, 2015

Are people honest and transparent? Short answer: Not completely. Let’s digress first, and then come back to a better answer.     To digress… why are honesty and transparency important? IMO, in two ways. The main reason: we can manage better with the truth. For example, we get better feedback in the Sprint Review. If we […]

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Christmas Baskets Program – You are invited to help

November 13, 2015

Every year a local Kiwanis group sponsors a “Christmas Baskets” program to help the children at Berryhill school. Berryhill is an elementary school in Charlotte, NC with children and families that are struggling.  This is probably true at many schools in our area, but this is the school they selected.  And the Communities in Schools program facilitates […]

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Poppendiecks: The tyranny of the plan

November 13, 2015

Here is a transcription of Mary Poppendieck’s talk. (The tyranny of the plan). You will find this insightful on many levels. You might find it more fun to see the video.  Your choice.

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Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior

November 2, 2015

This is what Craig Larman says on his website. I quote that page in full:   Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior After decades of observation and organizational consulting, here are Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior. These are observations rather than laws to follow. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level […]

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The ScrumMaster should not be a people manager – 2

November 2, 2015

This is a continuation of this post.     Before we start, some more basics… 1. The PO has an important role. Especially key in deciding which PBIs or user stories the team will get next, and important in many other ways, too. 2. The ScrumMaster has a key responsibility in making the ‘continuous improvement’ engine […]

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The Organization of the Scrum Course – 2

November 1, 2015

See Part 1.  Now continue below with Part 2…     One of the big problems is that the attendees, or many of them, resist intellectually. So, as in Zen, we have to confuse the intellectual mind in order to enable real learning to happen, or, as the Army says, we have to break them […]

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The ScrumMaster should not be the ‘people’ manager -1

November 1, 2015

At Agile Carolinas we recently had a good meeting tonight about the ‘iteration manager’ role that one firm is using.  And with a good discussion of the pros and cons. Many thanks to Ike Eichorn and Brad Ball. I do not wish to discuss all the ideas raised, but make a few observations about how […]

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The Organzation of our Scrum course – 1

October 31, 2015

Why is our Scrum course organized the way that it is?     First, is a Scrum Team organized? Well, a good Scrum is usually described more as adaptive than organized. Of course, we can debate the meaning of these words, during a day or during a sprint, or during a release. I would rather […]

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Agile Manifesto – History…

October 30, 2015

As you know, the Agile Manifesto and the Agile Principles define agile, to many of us. These statements were written and agreed to in 2001. There has been some debate about them, but they provide some excellent principles to remember as you are doing agile.  If your practice embodies these principles, then I think your […]

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‘Teams that Finish Early Accelerate Faster’

October 14, 2015

This is an excellent article: Teams That Finish Early Accelerate Faster.  It is by Jeff Sutherland and others. It addresses a key issue:  How do we get Scrum teams to be more successful? One answer is that ‘scrum’ teams are not always doing Scrum. More likely, they are not doing all of Scrum.  We know […]

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