Category Archives: Better Agile

Question: Building user stories remotely…

Question: Hi Joe! Quick question – what have you found to be the best approach for creating user stories for the team members that are participating remotely? We have a release planning meeting for a group that has three team members in Connecticut and will be dialing in for the meeting. We have GoToMeeting and […]

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Kanban – Love it. Why?

I have been working on Kanban lately. I love the Lean ideas.  There is so much we still need to do and understand better.  Interestingly, the ideas are counter-intuitive to most people yet, obviously simple and powerful when you take some time to do them. The one sentence version (hugely over-simplified): For most people, I […]

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Scaling with Agile: A Patterns Approach

I will be speaking to the Agile CoP of the PMI in Nashville.  Lots of interesting things are happening in Nashville.  A very nice place. Here is the title of the discussion: Scaling: A Patterns Approach. Here is the description: An introduction to some concepts for scaling in Agile/Scrum and how to use them effectively […]

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Southern Fried Agile – Proposed topics

Some of you may find interest in the topics I proposed for Southern Fried Agile.  I may or may not ‘get’ any of these…. Culture, Change, Scrum: What we can do about it This is an evolving topic for me.  I spoke on this same basic topic last time, and people seemed to be pretty […]

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Courses and Workshops we offer

Here is a list of all the lean – agile – scrum courses and workshops we offer.  We do these both publicly and in-house. Course and Workshop Offerings Ver10 This is not a complete list, but gives a good overview. We will update this listing from time to time. Of course we are happy to […]

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The Truth: Scrum is Not Easy!

May I tell the truth? I am a trainer, and people come to my courses.  And often they want an easy answer.  A magic answer that is not disturbing, or bothersome, but is in every way good, easy, friendly and just better. In other words, they come to change, but they don’t want to change.  […]

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Scaling Whitepaper

We have started a scaling whitepaper.  It will go through many iterations.  Now version 5. Getting Starting with ScalingVer5 Please comment on how you think this paper should evolve, and which key questions this paper should address. Thanks.

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Impediments – Charlotte Course July 2014

In the Charlotte course, the following impediments were identified.  These came from different people and were expressed in different ways.  I copied what they said.  So, for example, sometimes a “…, lack of” is implied. No one knows what done looks like Missed stakeholders Poor or non-existent planning One release per year (mentality) Technology Undefined […]

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Why Managers Should Crave Agile

One idea in the Agile community is that with Agile, we do not need managers anymore. For those of us who have had Dilbert managers, this is a happy thought. But actually, a silly thought.  Because even pretty good managers add value and we should have good managers.  And ‘good’ means not only morally sound, […]

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EPMO for a Smaller Company

In Waterfall we might need something else, but in Agile, what do we want from an Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO)?  If we have a relatively small company (total employees near 1,000, innovation group near 100).  (Obviously, if the company were 300,000 people, it would be a different game.) Let me discuss this in 7 […]

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