Blog: Agile & Business

Public Impediments – Charleston Oct 2014

October 15, 2014

Until you are perfect, you have impediments to fix. Here are the ones identified quickly in the course in Charleston. From an Agile point of view, I am not sure I would agree all are impediments. Team member looking for other work Lone wolf attitude with some team members Changing technology Lack of specific skills […]

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Can we make a promise?

September 28, 2014

Well, can we? There are some who do ‘waterfall’ (well, to be fair, something very roughly like the waterfall that Dr. Royce defined in 1970), and some of them seem to believe that we know enough early on, and change will be small enough for the rest of the effort, that we can promise a […]

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Is Scrum about spirit?

September 28, 2014

I hear people talk about Scrum quite a bit.  And I talk about Scrum.  Usually we are talking about the basics of Scrum, which sometimes seem so mundane.  Get a Team, make them a real Team, do the SM role well, do the PO role well, have some better meetings, build some artifacts, etc, etc. […]

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Impediments – Charlotte Sept 2014

September 22, 2014

The following impediments were identified: Egos No proper test environment Bad data Process failure external market Lack of coordination Unrealistic timeframe Change Mgmt Org changes Changes in technology Budget Customer communication (lack of) Too many defects Waterfall “hangover” No accountability Management interference Bad product owner Lack of structure Lack timeline Ru out of money Unclear […]

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Agile Release Planning workshop – Comments

August 24, 2014

I have many comments to add to the blog, and many topics to discuss.  Let me start with this one. Last week we had another Agile Release Planning workshop, in Montreal.  (We do one almost every week.)  The workshop is mainly about taking a real set of work (about 6 months of work for one […]

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Scaling Workshop – New thoughts

August 23, 2014

David Muldoon and I just had a new Scaling workshop in Montreal.  Two days talking about scaling, and solving problems. One quick observation Scaling is ugly.  That is, scaling is always a compromise. We talked about the ideal state; what would we ideally want things to be like.  One way of expressing part of that: […]

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Kanban: Taiichi Ohno quote

July 24, 2014

As David Anderson notes in his book, one of the best things about Kanban is improvements, continuously getting better. Taiichi Ohno invented the Kanban idea in the 1950’s when he visited Piggly-Wiggly, an American supermarket.  He explains most of this in his book, Toyota Production System. The book has one short section titled: Kanban Accelerates […]

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Question: Building user stories remotely…

July 24, 2014

Question: Hi Joe! Quick question – what have you found to be the best approach for creating user stories for the team members that are participating remotely? We have a release planning meeting for a group that has three team members in Connecticut and will be dialing in for the meeting. We have GoToMeeting and […]

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Kanban – Love it. Why?

July 19, 2014

I have been working on Kanban lately. I love the Lean ideas.  There is so much we still need to do and understand better.  Interestingly, the ideas are counter-intuitive to most people yet, obviously simple and powerful when you take some time to do them. The one sentence version (hugely over-simplified): For most people, I […]

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Scaling with Agile: A Patterns Approach

July 19, 2014

I will be speaking to the Agile CoP of the PMI in Nashville.  Lots of interesting things are happening in Nashville.  A very nice place. Here is the title of the discussion: Scaling: A Patterns Approach. Here is the description: An introduction to some concepts for scaling in Agile/Scrum and how to use them effectively […]

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