Blog: Agile & Business

Ready to listen?

October 13, 2009

From Catherine Louis: I’m getting ready for a 4-day training session in Mt. Hood Oregon teaching new handlers how to work with their K9’s toward becoming an operational search and rescue team. One of the “Ahaaa!” moments in training is teaching the handlers how not to ignore the K9’s innate behavior. One very small example […]

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The doctrine of sufficiency

October 4, 2009

Agile and Scrum start with the assumption that a team is sufficient for the task set before it. This is a bit wacky, or an assumption subject to being false a lot, unless we allow the truth, which is that humans are very inventive. Thus, a given seven-member Scrum team can do many things to […]

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The CSM Test

September 26, 2009

As you may know, Scrum Alliance is implementing a CSM Test on Oct. 1. Here are a few basic statements. First, the real purpose for you should not be certification and all that alphabet soup. It might be helpful, but it is not the main purpose. The real purpose is improving people’s lives. The customers, […]

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To know ourselves

September 19, 2009

We are in a recession, so we think especially now that money is important. Some of us are introvert technical guys — people skills are not our strongest skill set maybe. So we think strong technical thoughts are the most important things. But at the end of the day, I believe we live for other […]

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The ability to create knowledge together

August 22, 2009

I would like your opinion. I have, for the last few months, been playing with these ideas. To create a new product, the team is all about knowledge creation. Not management of existing knowledge, but creation of new knowledge. Note: The picture to the right relates to Nonaka’s ideas about knowledge creation, and tacit and […]

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Against Central Planning

August 18, 2009

Do we like central planning?  No. In general, to some of us it seems simpler to have one central brain plan everything, to assume that that brain has it right and that “everything will work out for the best in this best of all possible worlds” if the central planner plans it for us rationally. […]

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Knowledge Decay & Tacit Knowledge

August 17, 2009

Daniel Brown did an interesting post on this topic. His main area is testing. Disclosure: He mentions my talk about the Lean within Scrum. See here.

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Learning more

July 31, 2009

If you are looking to do some more learning, may I suggest these resources. Many rooms to visit, many different kinds of resources. It includes people of many persuasions. But all of them, in one way or another, are saying the same thing: “Go, and do. Better than we have done yet, you will do. […]

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One impediment at a time

July 28, 2009

Why is it important to focus attention on one thing at a time, one impediment? Well, there are many reasons. But let’s take a few. First, get something completed. So often we try to do “everything” and nothing gets done. Second, we need fast feedback. For example, sometimes our “improvement” is a stupid idea. Only […]

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Thinking for Yourself

July 27, 2009

Here is a great blog post by Kenji Hiranabe about why thinking for yourself in your specific context is important in Lean. In the picture to the right is Mr. Satoshi Kuroiwa, the chairman of the Association for Support for Economic Sustainable Development in Japan.     

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