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Category Archives: Key problems
What is Scrum?
I am excited to be giving a Certified ScrumMaster course with Jeff Sutherland next week in Richmond, Virginia. So, I was thinking: What is the essence of Scrum if you would play the game well? (Remember that Scrum is named for the Scrum formation in Rugby. We often show a video of the famous All […]
Fun & Success – Learn Scrum
Fun & success? In the same sentence? “You are doing Scrum right if and only if you are having more fun. Serious fun.” “You are doing Scrum right if and only if you are having clear success.” How can these both be true? Pushing through to success is so stressful. Fun is light-hearted, like laughter. […]
ACTION: Go identify your multiple. Now.
Two posts ago, I buried a key idea in a lengthy list. Here’s the gist. When the managers come around trying to figure out who to “re-engineer,” would it be helpful to be able to say, “Guys, the firm invested in our team about $1 million last year and got about $3 million back in […]
Contradictions
I have been noticing the contradictions in Agile and Scrum lately. Jeff Sutherland recently did a post about persuasion. The latest post might be summarized as: “To persuade you must be confident and humble.” I guess no contradictions there, but he does talk about contradictions elsewhere. And this quote has been bouncing inside my head […]
Is Agile useful now?
You may have noticed a few not-entirely-happy things happening out there in the economy. It might even have affected you and perhaps even your place of work. So, in what ways is Agile relevant now? First, Agile is even more relevant now than before. (OK, just my assertion so far; see below.) Second, for reasonable […]
Mura, Muri, Muda
These are Lean words, in Japanese, and I always get them confused, especially the first two, so I am doing this post partly to remind me what each word means. They are all in the negative. Mura: Unevenness of flow. Thus, the first thing to do is establish a reasonable pull, an even flow. Muri: […]
“How to Tap IT’s Hidden Potential”
“How to Tap IT’s Hidden Potential” was the title of an article in the WSJ on March 10. Published in collaboration with the MIT Sloan Management Review. The subhead read: “Too often there’s a wall between a company’s information-technology department and everything else. That wall must go.” I remember getting a paper back in the […]
Tell Her No
Yesterday, I was teaching a class where many of the attendees were from the same company. They had one major issue: At almost every Sprint, either the Product Owner or a Stakeholder would add one or more stories in the middle of the Sprint. I find this to be a common problem. Indeed, the new […]
Have Compassion
Today I was in a meeting with business and technology folks, and I started talking about customer collaboration over contract negotiation. (Many will recognize this line from the Agile Manifesto.) I talked about how there is distrust, tension and misunderstanding between the business side and the technology side. Well, at least on Day One, every […]
Getting Business Decisions Made – 2
A few days ago I posted on this subject — this is a continuation of that post. I had already discussed the first of Esther Derby’s six steps. (Again, I am trying to discuss something different from what she was going at, so naturally there will be differences.) Now, let’s discuss her second step: Step […]