Category Archives: Better Agile

Wide-band delphi estimation for Business Value – 1

Revised: 9/26/2023 Many, many teams and I have been doing wide-band delphi estimation of Business Value for several years now. Let me report how we do it. It helps build success in many ways, so you are likely to find these patterns useful. In fact, as far as we can tell, it is more successful […]

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Wideband Delphi estimation

This has been a commonplace idea for many people for decades, used in Agile for estimating effort for at least one decade and only talked about in Agile for estimating Business Value for a few years. See Wikipedia’s article here. See James Grenning’s article here.

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Agile Alliance website – Agile 101

The new Agile Alliance website has a new Agile 101 section. Within that section is a “Practices Timeline.” The timeline is pretty good, and will almost surely introduce you to some key ideas — some that you know (but maybe not well enough) and probably even some you don’t know (but should).

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Scrum at Scale – 4 parts

Jeff Sutherland has recently done a great job in describing his ideas on scaling. Here are three things I think are key: Scale down. That is, it is complex to get lots of people involved in one problem or effort.  Simplify. Use patterns. (E.x. Do not try to implement all of some big poster on scaling […]

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Executive Action Team

Jeff Sutherland has defined an Executive Action Team. This is similar to the Management Scrum idea that I discussed. You will also notice that Ken Schwaber and Mike Cohn have described roughly similar ideas to what Jeff is describing. (I will look up later the names they gave to those teams.) Jeff Sutherland’s idea is […]

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Management Scrum Team – Part 4

This is the last of 4 parts. See here for the first part. Links to all four parts are there, or search to the right. __________________________________ Retrospective. Again, telling the truth here can be difficult. The whole MST comes to this meeting at the end of every Sprint. For a two-week Sprint, maybe two hours. […]

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Management Scrum Team – Part 3

This is the 3rd of 4 parts. Part 1 starts things. ________________________________ Now we come to a harder meeting. The Sprint Review. It is hard because no one in this team is used to showing anything completed in two weeks. They are often used to showing Powerpoints. Vaporware. “Thoughts.” With knowledge workers or managers, when […]

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Management Scrum Team – Part 2

Part 2.  (See here for Part 1.) Now, the work of the Sprint needs to be defined in small ‘stories.’ To me, for two weeks, eight stories for a team of seven is about small enough. Team. Did I mention that this is and should be a cross-functional and multi-functional team? The ‘people’ within the […]

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Management Scrum Team – Part 1

This is an important idea that more and more people are talking about. One reason: Managers need to learn about Scrum. They can take a course, but they also need the ‘reality’ of being in a real Scrum Team. (Real does not have to mean a software dev team.) Another important reason: Managers can be […]

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Honesty and Scrum

Are people honest and transparent? Short answer: Not completely. Let’s digress first, and then come back to a better answer.     To digress… why are honesty and transparency important? IMO, in two ways. The main reason: we can manage better with the truth. For example, we get better feedback in the Sprint Review. If we […]

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