Blog: Agile & Business

Getting the right people in the Team – Richard Branson

September 24, 2013

For useful innovation, truly good and fast innovation, I think a Team is essential.  They must do knowledge creation in a Team. As Takeuchi and Nonaka have explained pretty darn well. A real team, not a group of individuals. As a friend just reminded me, probably the most important thing in getting a Team started […]

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Scaling: Don’t forget the Team

September 18, 2013

What do you have if you have good scaling but all the Teams are terrible?  Nothing. What do you have if you have lame scaling, but all the Teams are good?  Something that is still pretty darn powerful. *** What happens when ‘everyone’ is talking about scaling?  They forget about the Teams.  And the Teams […]

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Frameworks to Scale Agile – Some comments

September 18, 2013

First, here is a page that starts to explain SAFe.  SAFe is one of the better known ‘scaling agile’ frameworks.  http://scaledagileframework.com/ You should also look at Larman and Vodde’s book: Scaling Lean and Agile Development.  (They have other books.)  Also see their LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) framework, here. Next, Jeff Sutherland and Jim Coplien and others […]

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What does the Scrum framework do?

September 17, 2013

To be honest, Scrum itself doesn’t ‘do’ anything.  Scrum is just a basic framework that gives you some practices, etc (and includes some values and principles).  It depends mostly on the people in the field, or, we might say, in the Team. Scrum will immediately help in some ways. But its main value, IMO, is […]

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Starting agile adoption

September 17, 2013

Imagine that you have some interest in Agile. Perhaps you read a book, and talked with a friend who is doing agile at his firm. Then you take a Scrum course. Now what do you do? Let’s take a middle of the road case, where you have a software development group of 80 or so, […]

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The ScrumButt Test (4): You know who the Product Owner is

September 16, 2013

In this series, I  am going over each question in the ScrumButt Test. The first section of the ScrumButt Test is a quick determination: are you doing incremental development? The second section is: are you doing Scrum? We are now up to the first question in the second section. It is: Do you know who […]

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Advice from an experienced successful PO

September 16, 2013

I was doing a course with Dave Muldoon in Ottawa. And Rich O’Grady visited us. He had become a very successful product owner in a difficult environment where others had failed.  He mentioned 6 ‘top tips’ that day, and then he wrote me explaining them a bit more.  What he wrote was pretty much what […]

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Adopting Agile: Ask questions

September 15, 2013

Some of you know I like Yogi Berra.  As a side note, here are a lot of his quotes. I hope you laugh at a few. (Laughter is a great way to influence people.) Ok, so Yogi Berra reminded us by saying: “Some people, if they don’t already know it, you can’t explain it to […]

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What’s wrong with that impediment list?

September 15, 2013

Let’s pretend that the impediment list I just posted (the one from the Charleston class) was a real public impediment list for your team. What would be wrong with it? First, the most important thing to say is: GREAT!  Finally, a public list of key things to work on.  And, if we worked hard on […]

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Impediments: from the Charleston CSM class in September

September 13, 2013

As you may know, I think in Scrum it is key to aggressively attack impediments. I think each Team should have a (mostly) public impediment list. The SM should be attacking the top impediment each day.  This ‘kaizen’ should lead to improvements in velocity. Every Team can get better. Always. An impediment is anything (anything!) […]

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