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Category Archives: Better Agile
The Nokia Test (3): Agile Specifications
The third line in the Nokia Test is: “The Iteration must start before the specification is complete.” What does this mean? The first practical goal was to eliminate the analysis paralysis and delay associated with waiting until the specification was “complete.” I don’t know all the details at Nokia, but I have lived them at […]
Toward a general theory of Business Value
The title of this post is a little highfalutin, but it gets the idea across I hope. After many discussions with people about this subject, I find that the words “Business Value” tend to mean something very narrow to most individuals. For example, the words often mean, mostly: “the numbers we put on the story […]
The Nokia Test
Nokia (the cell phone maker) uses Scrum. Well, actually it is/was a small Euro 50 billion joint venture called Nokia Siemens Networks. They have developed a test to check whether a team is really using Scrum or just doing what I call Cowboy Agile, or doing Agilefall (talking Agile terms, but really doing mostly waterfall). […]
Top Enterprise Impediments – Part 2
This post is a continuation of the previous post on Top Enterprise Impediments. Here we add three more impediments. None or minimal business commitment. This problem is very common. It derives in part from the business people viewing Lean-Agile as a technology initiative. It also derives from the business people believing in magic. I mean: […]
Some Top Enterprise Impediments
I have had several conversations on this topic lately, so I thought I would post some thoughts. Actually, this will take several posts. (And one could argue that many earlier posts are also about this topic.) My aim in the comments below is to identify and describe the main impediments that are most typical in […]
Delivering Solutions
As I was saying earlier, in all my clients there is this divide between business and technology. “I’m a business guy, not a technology guy.” “Oh, I work in IT; go ask the business folks that.” This is not a helpful distinction. The customer does not want business or technology or even a product. The […]
Leaders, Managers, Bosses, and Administrators
This is another blog post inspired by the Poppendiecks, their books and their interest in Lean. In their book “Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash,” the Poppendiecks talk, as one of their topics, about leadership. They raise several excellent points. A team needs leadership. Which is to say, vision. Someone to inspire and […]
Agile is like golf
I went to New York last week to visit friends and to visit one of the greatest cities in the world. Wonderful energy. A fairly well-known joke line goes like this: How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Answer: Practice, practice, practice. This is one of my main points as I watch The Masters golf […]
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls
(See note on the title of this post below.) In my culture, this is the beautiful, daffodil time of year. When spring has sprung; and when Passover and Easter come to pass, yet again. The long cold winter is over, and the stream of life bursts forth in joy; if just to be alive again. […]
Judgment Under Uncertainty
Tom Peters’ blog has this post about Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, by Daniel Kahneman, Paul Slovic and Amos Tversky. They are psychologists, but Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in economics for prospect theory. The issue — making decisions in a world of uncertainty — seems quite relevant to Agile. For the customer, for […]