Category Archives: Better Agile

Using Velocity to compare 3 Teams

Yesterday I gave a webinar on “Velocity and Story Points”.  The deck is on this website. Pooya asked a longer question, but I’ll start with this simpler question: “Can you use Velocity to compare 3 Teams to each other?” Key Preliminary Scrum is a game. If you do it right, people like having things “gamified.”  […]

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The New Methodology

Here is a set of webpages (much like linked blog posts) that Martin Fowler wrote.  Looks like in 2005. https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/newMethodology.html Very good stuff. Most of it still applies.   Martin Fowler was one of the authors of the Agile Manifesto (and the Agile Principles).  agilemanifesto.org For more info on Martin Fowler see this Wikipedia article: […]

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HBR: 5 Questions to Get Your Project Team on the Same Page

Photo by 2H Media on Unsplash   https://hbr.org/2023/10/5-questions-to-get-your-project-team-on-the-same-page Above is the link to the HBR article.  I believe anyone can get access. Here’s the opening paragraph: When a misaligned project team succeeds, it’s an accident. Without alignment — that is, a shared understanding and commitment — team members work at cross-purposes and doom projects to failure. […]

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Essence – Other card sets

Ivar Jacobsen has put together cards that explain quickly many of the different agile “methods” or “tools.” (I would call User Stories a tool.)  Very useful. Here is a card set for User Stories: user_story_essentials_cards Here is a card set for “agile essential practices”: agile_essentials_practice_cards Enjoy! Use these with some of the Agile Games described […]

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Scrum Cards / Essence

Scrum cards: To many of you that will mean the Fibonacci cards, AKA Planning Poker (TM) cards. But NO!  At least not this time.  This time we mean the “scrum_cards” (that name is the title of the PDF file) that explain Scrum. Below is a link for the new version of the Scrum Cards (again, […]

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Webinar on Scrum Guide 2020 on March 21, 2023

Hi all, We talked through the Scrum Guide. Some questions came up: Q: Will you tell us exactly how Scrum works? Hmm.  The Scrum Guide kind of does that.  And I added to  that.  Still I am not sure it was “exactly” or “completely”.  There is always a lot more to add and you all […]

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Brian Marick

Brian Marick was on of the 17 signers of the Agile Manifesto. His quote is: “An example would be handy right about now.” Here is a blog post about him (Brian), by another very interesting person: https://medium.com/@JoshuaKerievsky/example-guided-a-brief-history-f004ca19a96f Enjoy!

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What if one Team member does not agree with the process? (eg, to do “scrum”)

For our work, we have two related ideas.  The Team and the team’s process.  (Yes, there are many other ideas, principles, values too.) The Team Most people, I think, like working on a pretty good team.  Often quite a lot. Of course, not every team is good. Some people need an adjustment time. See the […]

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What is Scrum? – by Ken Schwaber

Here is a short paper by Ken Schwaber: whatIsScrum Willem-Jan Ageling (here) says that the paper is from 2003.  So, about 10 years after Scrum was invented. Schwaber and Sutherland (and others) had written many papers by then.  And the Scrum Guide (of 2009) had not yet been written. It is interesting to see the […]

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Fixing Agile Transformations – 1

Wow, what a big topic! Jon Jorgensen put up a post on LinkedIn.  Here: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6978462442318135297/ (Jon has lots of good posts. Recommended.) I have not asked Jon exactly what he meant by his question.  I suspect a bit of mid-western sarcasm is involved. Here is my reaction, which is meant to be of some partial […]

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