Category Archives: Better Agile

3 Ways a Scrum Team is Managed

We think it is reasonable to manage a Scrum Team in at most 3 ways.  (OK, we mention also a fourth.) (Context: To simplify, we assume a smallish firm with teams that are mostly working independently.  There are lots of other contexts.) There are two main rules. A. Do NOT over-manage or over-control the Team.  […]

Read More »

9 Key Statements about Estimating

I won’t explain them now, but here’s the summary… Estimations can be mis-used by some managers (and have been).  Watch out! Customers want some kind of estimate. (Ask for details about the kind of estimate they want.) There is a trade-off between the time it takes to estimate and relative accuracy.  Keep it shorter (usually) […]

Read More »

Can the Team promise a date?

I think this is an important question. To promise? Umm.  What does a promise mean?  Can Joe Namath promise a Super Bowl victory? One song lyric is: “Promises, promises, I’m all through with promises, promises now.”  Many a song about broken promises.  One of my favorites is the Eric Clapton upbeat blues song: “Promises”.   Check […]

Read More »

Public Impediments – Charleston Oct 2014

Until you are perfect, you have impediments to fix. Here are the ones identified quickly in the course in Charleston. From an Agile point of view, I am not sure I would agree all are impediments. Team member looking for other work Lone wolf attitude with some team members Changing technology Lack of specific skills […]

Read More »

Can we make a promise?

Well, can we? There are some who do ‘waterfall’ (well, to be fair, something very roughly like the waterfall that Dr. Royce defined in 1970), and some of them seem to believe that we know enough early on, and change will be small enough for the rest of the effort, that we can promise a […]

Read More »

Is Scrum about spirit?

I hear people talk about Scrum quite a bit.  And I talk about Scrum.  Usually we are talking about the basics of Scrum, which sometimes seem so mundane.  Get a Team, make them a real Team, do the SM role well, do the PO role well, have some better meetings, build some artifacts, etc, etc. […]

Read More »

Impediments – Charlotte Sept 2014

The following impediments were identified: Egos No proper test environment Bad data Process failure external market Lack of coordination Unrealistic timeframe Change Mgmt Org changes Changes in technology Budget Customer communication (lack of) Too many defects Waterfall “hangover” No accountability Management interference Bad product owner Lack of structure Lack timeline Ru out of money Unclear […]

Read More »

Agile Release Planning workshop – Comments

I have many comments to add to the blog, and many topics to discuss.  Let me start with this one. Last week we had another Agile Release Planning workshop, in Montreal.  (We do one almost every week.)  The workshop is mainly about taking a real set of work (about 6 months of work for one […]

Read More »

Scaling Workshop – New thoughts

David Muldoon and I just had a new Scaling workshop in Montreal.  Two days talking about scaling, and solving problems. One quick observation Scaling is ugly.  That is, scaling is always a compromise. We talked about the ideal state; what would we ideally want things to be like.  One way of expressing part of that: […]

Read More »

Kanban: Taiichi Ohno quote

As David Anderson notes in his book, one of the best things about Kanban is improvements, continuously getting better. Taiichi Ohno invented the Kanban idea in the 1950’s when he visited Piggly-Wiggly, an American supermarket.  He explains most of this in his book, Toyota Production System. The book has one short section titled: Kanban Accelerates […]

Read More »