Category Archives: Better Agile

The Fuller Picture of the Scrum Team

What does the Scrum Team look like in context? In ScrumLand there are many many pictures of this.  Here is one that is a bit different. In this case, the context is not the process but other things and other people. See here: One could start many places in describing this picture.  I’ll start this […]

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New HBR article… Agile at Scale

Thanks for Rijon Erickson, we can link you to a great HBR article now: Agile at Scale by Rigby, Sutherland, and Noble. https://hbr.org/2018/05/agile-at-scale Enjoy!

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The Impediment List

The most important thing a ScrumMaster does is remove impediments. This is easy to say, since anything that needs to be fixed or changed we define as an impediment. What is an Impediment? So, just about anything can be an impediment. So, how do we define an impediment?  One way: Anything that is slowing down […]

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Alternatives to scaling

Here is an email I recently sent. (Slightly modified.)  Said quickly, but some key points. *** Hi all, Just wanted to share these ideas quickly.  Some may find them new, and some people may not. First: In this context I am defining scaling as 3 teams working together on one product. The reason we want […]

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The Advanced CSM Course (A-CSM)

The main goal of the course is to help you become more effective so you can then help your team and organization improve faster, and improve significantly — such as to 5-10x more Velocity with higher quality and more fun for the team. The specific rules of the A-CSM course requires us to spend most […]

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A resource for Business Analysts

Here is a new resource for business analysts. In general, this is a very important skill set and we do not give it sufficient attention in Agile, in my opinion. Yes, there are issues. The people who have been business analysts are good people. Yes, we do not want a special role (especially as a […]

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Stupid Impediment Tricks – 1

I wanted to review some “obvious” ideas about impediments. Here’s a starting blog post on that theme. No problem is the problem. A lot of teams and people want to have the idea that they are “as good as it gets,” and it may be true that they are very good. In the Lean community […]

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The Agile Challenge – Success criteria

A winning entry must of course include some description that explains that your team used Agile. It also needs to explicitly or implicitly include an argument that shows you were more successful because of Agile, and that Agile was at least one of the key causes of success. Any flavor of Agile is OK: DSDM, XP, […]

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The Agile Challenge

I am devising a challenge called “The Agile Challenge.” I want to challenge all the Agile teams in North Carolina and South Carolina to prove they are the best. I want some firms or organizations to sponsor the challenge in every way: offer prize money, offer to support teams that enter the challenge, put their names on placards that […]

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Working Product and the DOD

This is one in a series on Scrum Intro. The preceding post is here. Now we come to the Working Product. The big phrase is “potentially shippable product increment.” What it means is first this: At the end of a Sprint, we expect every story that the team committed to in the Sprint Planning Meeting is […]

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