Category Archives: Better Agile

Webinar: Renewing Your Certification

I just did a half-hour webinar on this topic. Lots of good questions. Two main methods: Gather X (often 20) SEUs (Scrum Educational Units) (eg, to renew your CSM) Take or re-take a Scrum Alliance certification course (eg, re-take the CSM course) I will give this webinar again in a few weeks.  You are welcome […]

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Agile Release Planning – Questions

QUESTIONS Joe – during an agile release planning session how long do you estimate it will take for Business Sponsors to point approx 50 stories? Actually, I’m estimating we will need 32 stories for 6 months. Yes, I’m looking to hold an ARP at the end of Feb for 1 feature. Thanks, Craig REPLY First, […]

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BV Points – 1

QUESTION Hi Joe – reading your ARP book, and you talk about BV and highest number is 100. But, what is the harm in using regular 1,2,5,8,13 Fibonacci numbers for business value? I do get when you find R that it will be lower. R = Bv (5) / SP (5) would mean an R […]

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The illusion of control

Daniel Mezick has a good post in LinkedIn today: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielmezick_the-command-and-control-military-gets-agile-activity-6761443011659370496-itMo About the illusion of control, and the idea that control is an emergent property.  (There’s that darn word emergent again.)  See the article he links to: “The ‘Command and Control’ Military Gets Agile.” https://www.infoq.com/news/2010/06/c2-military-gets-agile/ *** Some quick thoughts. Of course it is an illusion that […]

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New “Refresher” course policy

We are introducing a new policy. For a very low fee, you can take ANY course again. Rules: It must be a course or workshop you have taken before (eg, per Scrum Alliance).  And that we give Any instructor.  You could have taken the original course with any instructor. You must have completed the original […]

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When NOT to scale

We had a great webinar yesterday on this topic. We defined scaling (which has many definitions) as 3 Teams working together on the same “product”.   Here are the drawings and some related slides: Not_Scaling_Jan_2021_2021-01-26_15.01.41 This is PDF of drawings on the iPad Not Scaling – 4 ideas V2 PDF from Keynote   Enjoy!

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Webinar: Two Patterns for Managers in Agile

This is another in our Webinar Series. Date: May 27, 2021 (Thursday) Time: 2 pm EDT, 1 hour. Link: (to be added — where you can register) We will discuss two patterns for how managers should interact with Team. For senior managers: The Executive Action Team. Many people have had this idea.  Jeff Sutherland prefers […]

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Some tools for Agile

Here are 4 tools I have been using in my courses.  And recommend, for you to use with your Teams. Microsoft Teams I am about to start using Microsoft Teams. They have added break-out rooms.  I think they work well enough for me. Lots of integrations.  But they make it easy (fairly easy) to start […]

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Get them Climbing again

It is typical for a Scrum team to start Scrum, get some improvement, and then plateau. That is, find some comfortable level of productivity, and just flatline there. Which I guess is fine, if that level were as good as that Team could do. But the level isn’t, and as they say, anyone can see […]

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Webinar: An Introduction to the Advanced CSM Course

We have a free webinar about our Advanced CSM course, to provide you information and to take your questions. *** We give this course every few months and have two courses schedule today (one to add). The A-CSM is part of the Path to CSP.  It helps you move one level higher as a CSM […]

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