Blog: Agile & Business

Business Value Engineering – 3 questions

March 18, 2009

I want to slightly change my definition of Business Value Engineering (see earlier post). It is the values, principles and practices that we use help us continuously improve the Business Value we deliver. Some questions and answers: Q. “Business Value.” OK, always good. Why add the word “engineering”? A. Scrum says you must always improve […]

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How honest should you be in Scrum?

March 17, 2009

First answer: Completely. If only the answer were that simple. Sorry, but Scrum and Agile provide no cookbook answer to this question. Some people use “honesty” to mean they get a right to be brutal to others (and also to ignore their own imperfections). More often, the de-facto thinking is, “Honesty means I won’t say […]

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Identify your multiple! What?!

March 13, 2009

Let’s discuss the last post from the skeptic’s point of view. Simon (the implementer) 1: “OK, I don’t want to get fired, but what’s this ‘multiple’ got to do with it?” The multiple is the relationship between the cost of the team and the NPV (net present value) of the benefits the team delivers. As […]

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ACTION: Go identify your multiple. Now.

March 3, 2009

Two posts ago, I buried a key idea in a lengthy list. Here’s the gist. When the managers come around trying to figure out who to “re-engineer,” would it be helpful to be able to say, “Guys, the firm invested in our team about $1 million last year and got about $3 million back in […]

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Contradictions

March 1, 2009

I have been noticing the contradictions in Agile and Scrum lately. Jeff Sutherland recently did a post about persuasion. The latest post might be summarized as: “To persuade you must be confident and humble.” I guess no contradictions there, but he does talk about contradictions elsewhere. And this quote has been bouncing inside my head […]

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Is Agile useful now?

February 23, 2009

You may have noticed a few not-entirely-happy things happening out there in the economy. It might even have affected you and perhaps even your place of work. So, in what ways is Agile relevant now? First, Agile is even more relevant now than before. (OK, just my assertion so far; see below.) Second, for reasonable […]

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Should we invest in a better Product Owner?

February 7, 2009

I won’t bore you with the calculation, but if you assume that a better Product Owner can: increase the value of Product Backlog items (stories) in the ‘project’ by 20% on average identify the Pareto curve partially in the Product Backlog, so that an 85-33 rule applies And if we assume that the team costs […]

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The great persuader is you

January 28, 2009

Last night I was speaking to the Metrolina PMI chapter. Good discussion; lots of interest in Agile. My topic was: Winning With Scrum. So, on that quickly. My experience and my hypothesis is that Scrum can be more fun and can enable your team(s) to be much more productive. It is designed to allow you […]

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Productivity Now

January 19, 2009

The economy is in a bit of a tailspin now. We can help ourselves. If you wait for the Wizards of Washington to help, you might wait for the wrong team. How do we get ourselves out of this jam? We need a simple way, a simple feedback loop, for telling if we are productive, […]

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Business Value Engineering

January 5, 2009

Business Value Engineering? What is that? Well, we mean all the practices and work-methods around assuring that more and more Business Value is being delivered to the customer, and the firm satisfies all its constraints (e.g., good return to shareholders). This is based on a key Lean idea. We are trying to optimize the end-to-end flow of […]

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