Blog: Agile & Business

Story Points rather than hours

June 1, 2013

Jeff Sutherland has a great post about this, here.  A must read.    

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Joe’s Unofficial Scrum Checklist V1.3

May 27, 2013

It is Memorial Day weekend and time for another edition of Joe’s Unofficial Scrum Checklist. (smile) No, not really. Someone in class asked what he could use to check if his teams were using Scrum well.  I suggested: The ScrumButt Test – 8 points. “A list summarizing Scrum” (V.5)  – 2 sides of one page.  […]

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PO Impediments – Charlotte May 2013

May 23, 2013

Several things to say about impediments: Few teams have a public impediment list. They should. Few teams are aggressively attacking impediments, as I see it. (I guess this depends on what one means by aggressive. I mean full time alienation of impediments. Mercilessly.) We must use impediments, and continuous improvement to get higher velocity in […]

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Predictable project or innovative project?

May 22, 2013

Mike Cottmeyer spoke at Agile Carolinas last night. He said many good and useful things. One thing he talked about is this: What kind of project do you have?  At one extreme, do you have a project that is pure innovation?  Or, do you have a project that it completely ‘predictable’, and the main problem […]

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A purpose for Agile

May 21, 2013

In general, it is useful to do the most important things. Not the things we are most sure about.  Not the things that we can do well.  Not the things we can predict well (or better). But, we should do the most important things, usually one at a time. Yogi Berra said: You have to […]

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‘They still want us to deliver too much in too little time!’

May 18, 2013

In a class, we had a large group of people from one company.  The company is doing or getting close to doing mostly Scrum. The managers and the Board have not attended a Scrum class. In any case, ‘management’ is still asking the Teams to deliver too much in too little time.  Both say the […]

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Question: How to order Stories in the PB

May 17, 2013

Question from a Class Attendee: A question, about ranking user stories. In the recent Scrum Master course, you indicated we should rank stories in the PB (Product Backlog) by Business Value and do them from the top down. In the Product Owner course back in 2011, you had us calculate R = BVP / SP […]

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ROI for Scrum Training

May 4, 2013

Does Scrum Training give a good ROI? Well, of course, that depends. Mainly, whether the Team (the full Team) takes an aggressive attitude toward improvement.  So, as you could guess, we train the attendees that a key job is to get continuously better.  We set the expectation of doubling velocity in the first year. Let’s […]

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Public Impediment List: “We don’t want to see the bad news.”

May 3, 2013

The Scrum Guide does not mention it, but I strongly advocate a public impediment list. The simple idea is: visual management, and single piece flow off the ‘top’ of the list.  That is: Make the team’s impediments visible and visual.  Prioritize them. And then actively work them each day.  With at least one meaningful impediment […]

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Intermediate CSPO Course

May 3, 2013

Scrum is, in a way, simple. But I think that, for many reasons, doing Scrum well requires continuous study. For one thing, we need to do the practices in harmony with the values and principles behind lean-agile-scrum.  Also, we are always forgetting the values and principles. But there is more to it than that. You […]

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