Category Archives: Better Agile

4 Things to Improve on Today

Here are four ideas about ways to get better results with Agile and Scrum.  We try to talk about these in the initial course.  But basically always they are not heard well enough — I have gotten used to this being normal, part of human nature and the cultures we live in. Higher Quality “Bad […]

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What happens to Project Managers?

From one of our students: Thank you Joe, I took the exam and passed 34/35! One question if I may: I noticed in the top mistakes list that ‘having a project manager’ is listed. Why is Project Manager so bad here? Does that just mean that a team tries to implement Scrum with a typical […]

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Emergent Leadership

In Scrum, the whole team is supposed to self-organize. By “whole team” we mean all seven people, the Product Owner, the Scrum Master and the “Doers.” They always self-organize — well, we can’t say they always do it successfully. Occasionally they do not self-organize well, but they did self-organize, kind of, given the conditions they […]

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Scrum Roles – Product Owner

Note: This is one in a continuing series of posts re Scrum Intro.  The preceding post is here. The Scrum Guide does not ‘require’ you to have a fully dedicated team.  I think if you read it carefully, you will see that they are urging you to have a fully dedicated team.  Certainly I strongly […]

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Question: Is Scrum all or none?

Kevin asked: (I paraphrase and greatly simplify his question, perhaps beyond his recognition)  ….. Do you have to do Scrum ‘all or none’? ANSWER: We get this question a lot, phrased in different ways.  Here is one answer. I consider it an Agile principle that people are free.  The idea started long before the Declaration […]

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Agile Release Planning – some questions

QUESTIONS: Hi Joe, I’ve read through your book [on Agile Release Planning] and want to say that it was a great review of our Friday session, I enjoyed your clear and concise language, and am sure this will make an excellent resource. But there are still a few things that are unclear to me; it […]

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Five Characteristics of Successful Teams

OpenView Partners is a venture capital firm. They have some wonderful stuff on their blog, and Jeff Sutherland often posts there. Here is another great post based on research at MIT about successful teams. Five Characteristics of Every Successful Team & How to Build Cohesion Let me list the five characteristics. Everyone on the team […]

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Self-organization: The secret sauce for improving your Scrum Teams

Here is a video of Jeff Sutherland speaking at the Googleplex in NYC a few years ago. It seems very relevant still. A couple of things to emphasize: If you are not enjoying the “Where the Hell is Matt?” video at first, bear with it. I think you’ll enjoy Jeff’s explanation. One of the hardest, […]

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HBR on Agile! May Issue.

The Harvard Business Review has three new resources on Agile now. The original classic article is “The New New Product Development Game” by Takeuchi and Nonaka. The first of three new resources is here. This is by Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland and Hirotaka Takeuchi. Rigby is with Bain, Sutherland is the co-creator of Scrum […]

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The Team sucks, the Backlog sucks, the Done Done sucks! I know! Let’s scale that!

I just led a discussion with Agile Charleston on this topic. The idea for this topic comes from a talk by Mike Cottmeyer at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando. I agreed with Mike that these three are three of the most common problems with teams, and they are fundamental. (One might argue that X is […]

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