Category Archives: Better Agile

Poppendiecks: The tyranny of the plan

Here is a transcription of Mary Poppendieck’s talk. (The tyranny of the plan). You will find this insightful on many levels. You might find it more fun to see the video.  Your choice.

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Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior

This is what Craig Larman says on his website. I quote that page in full:   Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior After decades of observation and organizational consulting, here are Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior. These are observations rather than laws to follow. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level […]

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The ScrumMaster should not be a people manager – 2

This is a continuation of this post.     Before we start, some more basics… 1. The PO has an important role. Especially key in deciding which PBIs or user stories the team will get next, and important in many other ways, too. 2. The ScrumMaster has a key responsibility in making the ‘continuous improvement’ engine […]

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The Organization of the Scrum Course – 2

See Part 1.  Now continue below with Part 2…     One of the big problems is that the attendees, or many of them, resist intellectually. So, as in Zen, we have to confuse the intellectual mind in order to enable real learning to happen, or, as the Army says, we have to break them […]

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The ScrumMaster should not be the ‘people’ manager -1

At Agile Carolinas we recently had a good meeting tonight about the ‘iteration manager’ role that one firm is using.  And with a good discussion of the pros and cons. Many thanks to Ike Eichorn and Brad Ball. I do not wish to discuss all the ideas raised, but make a few observations about how […]

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The Organzation of our Scrum course – 1

Why is our Scrum course organized the way that it is?     First, is a Scrum Team organized? Well, a good Scrum is usually described more as adaptive than organized. Of course, we can debate the meaning of these words, during a day or during a sprint, or during a release. I would rather […]

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Agile Manifesto – History…

As you know, the Agile Manifesto and the Agile Principles define agile, to many of us. These statements were written and agreed to in 2001. There has been some debate about them, but they provide some excellent principles to remember as you are doing agile.  If your practice embodies these principles, then I think your […]

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‘Teams that Finish Early Accelerate Faster’

This is an excellent article: Teams That Finish Early Accelerate Faster.  It is by Jeff Sutherland and others. It addresses a key issue:  How do we get Scrum teams to be more successful? One answer is that ‘scrum’ teams are not always doing Scrum. More likely, they are not doing all of Scrum.  We know […]

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Question: Automate Testing!

Dear Joe, In the course you emphasized how important it is to do many things….seemingly from the start.  One was automated testing.  This will be very hard for us to at my company.  Were you really serious that we must have automated testing immediately?!?!? Thanks, Janet **** Dear Janet, [First, I must confess that I […]

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The Management Scrum Team

This is an important idea that more and more people are talking about. One aspect: Managers can learn best what Scrum is and what agile is by being on a ‘real’ Scrum team. A more important aspect: Managers can be more effective on a multi-functional Scrum team. (Often.) *** STOP!  Why am I writing this […]

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