Category Archives: Better Agile

Getting Higher Velocity – Take 3

A recent conversation leads me to discuss some basic issues. Why do we care about velocity? To be honest, higher velocity is less important than higher business value. Higher velocity going the wrong direction does not help at all, and can hurts. We always need more clarity on: (a) what the customer will really want […]

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Scrum is a major management discovery

Steve Denning wrote an article titled “Scrum is a major management discovery.” A useful statement.  I recommend you read the article. It is clear and unfulfilled.  That is, we have by no means fulfilled all the promise implied by that statement.  Have many people forgotten that promise?  Or it is something we never think about?  […]

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Creativity

A friend was reading Daniel Pink’s book Drive. And so I started reading it. I had this series of thoughts. First, I have for a long time thought that the key thing about our jobs is creativity.  Takeuchi and Nonaka call it knowledge creation, but to me it remains essentially the same thing.  And it […]

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Nokia Test: Know your velocity (7)

Another installment in explaining the Nokia Test aka The ScrumButt Test. Background: There are far too many teams doing “Scrum, but…[eg, we don’t have a ScrumMaster]”.  This is not “full-out” Scrum, and almost always means that the team is not getting impressive results. My original blog post is here.  And I have other blog posts […]

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Getting higher velocity! Take 2

I posted yesterday these listed below would lead, or at least could lead, to higher velocity (higher productivity) in your new product development teams: * Better retrospective meetings * Better impediment lists * Better business cases to management * More effective action (get approval and implement one ‘fix’ until you get results) * Better use […]

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Getting higher velocity!

Higher velocity per se is not the end-all and be-all.  But it sure does help. Having trouble getting to hyper-productivity? Try these things.  Together. * Better retrospective meetings * Better impediment lists * Better business cases to management * More effective action (get approval and implement one ‘fix’ until you get results) * Better use […]

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How does QA fit in?

Question from Liz:  The team and I are starting agile and we can’t get much info on where QA fits into Agile. Answer: First, I want to reiterate Jeff Sutherland’s concern (mentioned in this blog post), that the biggest problem is too many teams are not getting to working product (working software) within a Sprint […]

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Release Planning: Business Value Points

One difference between what I recommend for Release Planning and what others recommend is Business Value Points (BVPs). What do I mean? First, is it useful to distinguish the Business Value (BV) of items in the Product Backlog?  Yes, of course. Why?  Many ways to explain.  One: Pareto says you can re-apply the Pareto rule […]

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Latest Reading List – Books

We have a list of recommended books at LeanAgileTraining.com, here. In addition, we can recommend the following: A Sense of Urgency by John Kotter Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas by Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising. Toyota Production System by Taiichi Ohno. The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition) […]

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Joe’s Approach to Agile Release Planning

Agile Release Planning is technically not part of Scrum.  But I think almost all Teams need it. As a coach, here are my thoughts on what Agile Release Planning should comprise. For 5-7 months of work, this could be done in about 1 day (maybe into a second day).  With good enough quality to then […]

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