Blog: Agile & Business

Business Value and Money: Killing Low Priority Projects

February 13, 2008

This topic is leading somewhere. It may take a few posts to fully get there. First, let me say that in my personal opinion (and Peter Drucker’s and many others’) business is not mainly about money. Money is a measure, but it is not why we run the race. Business is about delivering satisfaction to […]

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The Nokia Test (2): Working Software

February 8, 2008

The second line in the Nokia Test says: Software must be tested and working by the end of each iteration. This is the second of three items that confirms the team (project) is “iterative.” There is a series of small tests (within the Nokia Test) if the team is really doing Scrum (in Nokia’s opinion). […]

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Tell Her No

January 18, 2008

Yesterday, I was teaching a class where many of the attendees were from the same company. They had one major issue: At almost every Sprint, either the Product Owner or a Stakeholder would add one or more stories in the middle of the Sprint. I find this to be a common problem. Indeed, the new […]

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5 Whys: To get better, ask why.

January 10, 2008

If you have a 2-year-old, or remember one; you are familiar with the word “why.” Repeatedly. Now, here is a more adult way to use that word. Lean tells us we should ask “why” all the time. In fact, the Five Whys to discover the root cause of a problem so we fix it once […]

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The Concept of “Ba”

January 8, 2008

“Ba can be thought of as a shared space for emerging relationships.” This is a quote from Nonaka’s paper called (surprise): “The concept of ‘Ba.’” Why is this important? Takeuchi and Nonaka work at a famous business school in Japan. They have been working on New Product Development to understand how and why some firms […]

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Little’s Second Law: “People are remarkably good at doing…”

December 19, 2007

Little’s Law is justly famous. I highly advise that your firm think about it, and use it as a justification for reducing the number of projects “in the system,” and also to justify having team members only work on one project. There are other reasons to do this, but Little’s Law is enough. Now I […]

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How to measure success on agile projects from a customer point of view

December 18, 2007

This topic is a thread on Scrum-Dev (the Yahoo list) these days. Excellent topic, with many good posts. Go and see. This is an involved topic, so I will give some views in this post and more later. I start with the word “measure.” I am concerned that we are measuring too many things (not […]

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The Nokia Test (1): Iterations must be timeboxed

December 14, 2007

I will be doing a series of posts that discuss each element in the Nokia Test (see earlier post). In this first post, we will focus on the first element in the Nokia Test: “Iterations must be timeboxed to less than six weeks.” First, remember that the first section of the test is to determine […]

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Acceptable Interruptions – Toward a better Daily Scrum

December 12, 2007

As many of you know, Scrum has a Daily Scrum or stand-up, where the team syncs up quickly (in 15 minutes). For some reason (or perhaps a variety of reasons), many teams either don’t get the value or take too long, or both. So, to make your Daily Scrum better, consider a couple of questions. […]

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Some video resources

December 12, 2007

Lachlan Heasman commented on a post, reminding me of some great video resources. For now, I’ll just mention the two of which he reminded me. There are earlier posts with other videos. Ken Schwaber talking about Scrum at Google. As I commented to Ken, good for lots of companies to know that Google is using […]

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