Blog: Agile & Business

Managers : Impediments

November 21, 2014

It should not be confusing how to manage in Scrum (agile). Let’s put a scope on this. We are talking about the management of innovation, using Teams. Not the management of BAU or regular production or whatever your firm calls that. I am less sure these principles (below) apply in those cases, but I do […]

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Agile Adoption: Two Styles Contrasted

November 1, 2014

Imagine a smallish organization with 10 Scrum teams (or what will be 10 Scrum teams).  I want you to be thinking of a relatively uncomplicated situation. Imagine that you offered two ways to implement agile. Let us assume that we believe that agile will lead to better lives for the workers and better lives for […]

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Avoid an Agile Adoption that’s ‘Meh’

October 30, 2014

There are many ways to adopt Agile or Scrum. And in a sense, it is true that each organization adopts agile in it’s own way. One broad set of patterns is ‘bottom-up’.  This means that it starts with one team, who finds out about it and starts doing it, and then it spreads.  Without official […]

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Strategy as Distributed Phronesis – Nonaka

October 30, 2014

Some of you will recognize this name.  He is one of the two men who wrote The New New Product Development Game, which directly lead to the creation and naming of Scrum. Here is the slide deck on “Strategy as Distributed Phronesis.” Sounds like a mouthful, but it has some great stuff . I think […]

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What does the Executive Team do in Scrum?

October 25, 2014

In an earlier post, we described an Executive Team in a smallish company (aka an oversight group in a larger company).  And we described a simple situation.  For example, the oversight group is responsible for 8-10 initiatives. Or, basically, 8-10 Scrum teams.  For now, let’s make it simple, and imagine that each Scrum Team is […]

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Why are we doing Agile?

October 24, 2014

We just had Southern Fried Agile in Charlotte.  See SouthernFriedAgile.com I have 5 take-aways.  For today, the first one. Why are we doing this? We are not doing Agile for Agile’s sake. We are doing it because we think it will help. And the most important people to help are…. well, first, everyone.  Everyone at […]

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Impediments – Charlotte – Oct 2014

October 22, 2014

This the list that this class identified: Indecisive Little stakeholder engagement Started development late LOB changed strategic direction Assumptions Lack of Test Environment & Data Undefined risk Lack of communication Missing requirements Too many bugs No DOD Time constraints (this is not yet a actionable impediments…but an issue for analysis IMO) Backing into dates Unreasonable […]

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3 Ways a Scrum Team is Managed

October 17, 2014

We think it is reasonable to manage a Scrum Team in at most 3 ways.  (OK, we mention also a fourth.) (Context: To simplify, we assume a smallish firm with teams that are mostly working independently.  There are lots of other contexts.) There are two main rules. A. Do NOT over-manage or over-control the Team.  […]

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9 Key Statements about Estimating

October 17, 2014

I won’t explain them now, but here’s the summary… Estimations can be mis-used by some managers (and have been).  Watch out! Customers want some kind of estimate. (Ask for details about the kind of estimate they want.) There is a trade-off between the time it takes to estimate and relative accuracy.  Keep it shorter (usually) […]

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Can the Team promise a date?

October 16, 2014

I think this is an important question. To promise? Umm.  What does a promise mean?  Can Joe Namath promise a Super Bowl victory? One song lyric is: “Promises, promises, I’m all through with promises, promises now.”  Many a song about broken promises.  One of my favorites is the Eric Clapton upbeat blues song: “Promises”.   Check […]

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