Blog: Agile & Business

Impediment List – Montreal Class

November 7, 2013

Here are the top impediments identified by the recent Montreal class.  There may be some similarities, (a different person might be trying to say essentially the same thing, but for his team).  Maybe your Team will recognize some good things to work on: Team too small Under-staffed Loss of communication (with) customer, stakeholders Not dedicated […]

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Scaling, Part 2

November 3, 2013

Here are some additional patterns to consider when Scaling. For now, consider that I am using a narrow definition of scaling, to mean, collocated teams working together on one product in a fairly tight way. 1. Upfront Work. To over-simplify, if we create any product, we plan, we build, we release.  That is the simplest […]

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Lean-Agile Resources

November 3, 2013

We have put together some Lean-Agile Resources on these pages. These include:  books, articles, videos, blogs, LinkedIn groups, etc, etc. Please give us your feedback and suggestions.

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Scrum Values

November 3, 2013

All of you should be aware of the Agile Manifesto and the Agile Principles. To me, they are not perfect, but they are an excellent expression of many key ideas behind Agile.  And we should be thinking about them every day.  They require thought and common sense to consider how they should be applied on […]

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ALN RDU: Joe’s Agile Release Planning

October 22, 2013

I had the pleasure of speaking to the Agile Leadership Network group in RDU tonight. First, there were a lot of smart people there and I enjoyed it. Here are some things I forgot to say or did not emphasize enough. 1. I have different goals from many for what we call agile release planning. […]

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SAFe, LeSS, DAD, and ScrumPLOP

October 20, 2013

First, I want to say that I feel each ‘large scale agile’ situation is different.  The key problems are different.  Therefore, the solution(s) should be different. And I like the idea of patterns. This is the pattern idea: “Here are some things (patterns) that others have found useful, and maybe I can steal from them, […]

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Why I prefer ‘Release Plan Refactoring’ to ‘grooming’

October 12, 2013

I was just doing a course with Dave Muldoon in Canada. One of the workshops was scaling. In that context, we discussed release plan refactoring or product backlog grooming. To me, the Scrum community has many definitions of ‘product backlog grooming.’ In fact, many different words for it. And it is confusing, especially to beginners. […]

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Basic Agile ‘scaling’ terms

October 12, 2013

Below are several key terms often used when discussing ‘Agile Scaling.’ They need to be addressed. Why? My experience is that when the community talks about these issues, they use these words in a very loose way.  The problems behind these words are quite real. The problems can  be somewhat improved if we work hard […]

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Key Impediments – Toronto

October 11, 2013

I am a big advocate of a public impediment list.  (Yes, for some of you, I am saying this again.  I think in general it bears repeating and repeating in a company.) It requires discussion to explain to skeptics WHY we recommend this. I will not attempt that discussion here ( maybe I should in […]

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Culture: Some steps to improve it (for Scrum)

October 7, 2013

I have been thinking a lot about corporate culture lately, and what we can do to change it. For example, to enable Scrum to get better results. Here is one article by John Kotter.  Pretty good I think. So, what can we do.  Here’s my advice to myself: 1. “Whether you think you can or […]

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