Subscribe to this blog
Interested in a Lean-Agile-Scrum course or Workshop?
Recent Posts
Categories
- agile
- agile business
- Agile principles
- Better Agile
- business value
- BV Engineering
- Change Management
- courses
- Events
- freedom
- Getting started
- impediments
- Innovation
- Jeff Sutherland
- Kanban
- Key problems
- knowledge creation
- leadership
- lean
- Lean Software Development
- learning
- Listings
- Little's Law
- Little's Second Law
- managing agile
- Misc
- Nokia Test
- Paying
- People issues
- Recommended reading
- Release Planning
- Resources
- scaling
- Scrum
- Scrum Intro
- Scrum meetings
- Scrum roles
- ScrumButt
- ScrumButt Test
- Self-organization
- Talks
- Teams
- video
- WIP
- Yogi Berra
Category Archives: Key problems
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 […]
Getting Business Decisions Made – 1
It is wonderful how we humans make decisions in life, and, in a certain way, it is even more wonderful how we make decisions at work. I do not wish to digress too much, but perhaps the first subject is the illusion of power. For example, perhaps most decisions in our business lives must be […]
Waste in projects…Working hard is not enough.
The second big idea in Lean is waste, or getting rid of waste (muda in Japanese). Seems obvious. Not many would say they are in favor of waste. First: Why do I want to talk about this? Many reasons. I meet so many development team members who are so gung-ho, they want to impress everyone […]