Category Archives: Better Agile

Selling the Benefits of Scrum

Two other CSTs (scrum trainers) made some comments in a Google Group, which got me thinking.  They reminded me of an exercise I normally do in my Scrum classes. Every class is different, but imagine a class that is mixed. Some people are new to Scrum, some have a few months experience, some have 9-24 […]

Read More »

Change: “You miss 100% of the shots you never take.”

The quote above is by Wayne Gretzky.  (Also ascribed to Michael Jordan.) I am flying to Canada now. And I like hockey. Today the quote reminds me of how hard change is. To make any change happen in an organization is hard.  It takes a lot of energy.  It takes a willingness to miss a […]

Read More »

We Band of Brothers

“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”  Another great phrase that Shakespeare wrote, this time for the mouth of Henry V. Here it is explained. The leadership in the real field of battle, against great odds.  You may find this interesting as well. Here it is enacted with Kenneth Branagh. You may wish […]

Read More »

Radical Management

Steve Denning has written a great agile book for managers, called The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management. Here are the five principles: A shift in the goal of making money for shareholders to delighting customers through continuous innovation. A shift in the role of managers from controlling individuals to enabling self-organizing teams. A shift in […]

Read More »

6 Myths of Product Development

This is a very useful article in the HBR, by Stefan Thomke and Donald Reinertson.  Reinertson is well known in the lean-agile community.  It is excellent.  Go here to buy it for $6.  Well worth it. Here are the myths or fallacies they mention: 1. High utilization of resources will improve performance. By ‘resources’ they […]

Read More »

Do only high benefit/cost work!

Tom DeMarco wrote an article a while ago: “Software Engineering: An idea whose time has come and gone?” (2009)  I guess I am just catching up on my reading. One topic is: are metrics useful? I think the real issue is: how useful is it that we ‘control’ projects? His comparison is: 1. If we […]

Read More »

High Priority Interrupt Work in Scrum

Imagine that you have new, high priority work, that gets identified during the sprint.  In other words, you don’t even know many of the stories or issues or tickets until after the Sprint Planning Meeting.  A support team is a classic example of this. How do you organize things in Scrum to handle this? The […]

Read More »

Kent McDonald on Release Planning

Here is a good article on release planning. Includes a video. Enjoy.

Read More »

The Term ‘Release Planning’

Is the term ‘Agile Release Planning’ useful? Mike Cohn has a good blog post about this, here. I agree and slightly disagree. First, we need to state the obvious principles. It is important, as far as possible, to be clear and consistent about what a word or phrase means. Release Planning normally implies planning for […]

Read More »

Agile Release Planning Booklet ver 1.08

Here is my latest Agile release planning booklet: “Joe’s Approach to Agile Release Planning.”  31 pages, including a table of contents.  Free now. PDF format. Some ideas or explanations are included, but mostly actionable steps. Feedback welcome.  jhlittle@kittyhawkconsulting.com

Read More »