Category Archives: Better Agile

Changing the culture through invitation and engagement

Some of you know my phrase: “People are remarkably good at doing what they want to do.” It is a down to earth way of saying: I think self-organization is the right thing. Or, I believe in freedom. Believing in freedom does not mean Congress will always vote the way you want.  Or even vote […]

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How to make the Whole Organization Agile

Steve Denning has written a short article summarizing his thoughts on this subject.  Very interesting. How To Make The Whole Organization Agile In the article you will see links to his blog posts and a mention of his book: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management. Enjoy!

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Teams that Finish Early Accelerate Faster

Jeff Sutherland has recommended this recent article: “Teams that Finish Early Accelerate Faster.” Here it is: teamsthatfinishearlyacceleratefaster What’s the deal? Well, many of us are seeing ‘scrum’ that is not … not achieving the results we would like to see.  I say it this way: we want everyone to achieve significantly better results.  Jeff Sutherland talks […]

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Question: Re Estimating with Story Points…

Dolores asks: Hi Joe – …I have always been taught that story points should never be compared to time measurements. However, we were using 1 story point = a day or a day and a half of work to estimate initial team velocity. One of the questions we often get about scrum is how do points […]

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Aggressively Attack the Impediments

We can look at impediments or continuous improvement many ways. In Scrum, we usually look at impediments as continuous improvement for one [Scrum] team at a time. Note: Of course, we can think of impediments for a scaled group of teams or for the agile adoption, and for other kinds of things. Not for today, […]

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State of Agile Survey 2015 – Version One

Version One does an annual survey of the state of agile.  Very useful. I am not sure it is a scientific survey, but it tries and generally gives some useful insight. See here. To me, it says progress is being made.  That is, more people are using Agile, and lives are getting better.  That is […]

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Scrum requires Effort

It seems many people expect Scrum to make magic happen by itself. This is of course an illogical expectation. It is true that Scrum (the roles, meetings and artifacts) will, with a bit of introduction, cause your team to get better without much additional effort or investment. But the real power of Scrum comes when […]

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Balancing the work in the Sprint (coding vs testing)

Dean asks: Your Lean Agile Training website content has provided some great insight in helping me improve my agile principles and practices. There is one thing I haven’t been able to clear out of my mind.  Perhaps there is a principle I’m not applying or a light bulb hasn’t come on. I haven’t come across […]

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Impediments: Orlando May 2015

During class in Orlando, the following impediments were identified.  Some duplications, I think, perhaps partly due to the way we/they did it. Bulky process Silos Customer rep with no mandate Blame game [Need] one more person on site with Front End [skills] Lack of motivation [Lack of] knowledge of new technology Delivery pressure, customer expectations […]

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Sprint Planning Meeting – The Basics

Note: I wrote a similar but different blog post on this same subject later.  This one says some useful things that one does not, and vice versa.  Might challenge your mind usefully to compare and contrast.  See here. At the beginning of each sprint is a Sprint Planning Meeting (SPM). Minor point: The SPM is […]

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