Category Archives: Key problems

Agile Contracts

Jeff Sutherland did a presentation at Agile 2013 that I think everyone should read and think about.  And read and think about again. Here is the slide deck: http://jeffsutherland.com/Agile2008MoneyforNothing.pdf

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What if Scrum is not working for you?

I was speaking to a smart guy who had taken (some while ago) my CSM course.  We were both waiting at the Cluj (Romania) airport. He made me think about this problem. The first thing to say is: Scrum is not a panacea.  It requires hard work.  Often people expect Scrum to magically make things […]

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Scaling, Part 2

Here are some additional patterns to consider when Scaling. For now, consider that I am using a narrow definition of scaling, to mean, collocated teams working together on one product in a fairly tight way. 1. Upfront Work. To over-simplify, if we create any product, we plan, we build, we release.  That is the simplest […]

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Why I prefer ‘Release Plan Refactoring’ to ‘grooming’

I was just doing a course with Dave Muldoon in Canada. One of the workshops was scaling. In that context, we discussed release plan refactoring or product backlog grooming. To me, the Scrum community has many definitions of ‘product backlog grooming.’ In fact, many different words for it. And it is confusing, especially to beginners. […]

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Culture: Some steps to improve it (for Scrum)

I have been thinking a lot about corporate culture lately, and what we can do to change it. For example, to enable Scrum to get better results. Here is one article by John Kotter.  Pretty good I think. So, what can we do.  Here’s my advice to myself: 1. “Whether you think you can or […]

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Scaling: How about the “Don’t do it!” option?

There is a lot of talk lately about scaling. And, to some degree, scaling is necessary and good. They say only truly professional Teams try complicated plays.  Or should try complicated plays.  Most ‘lesser’ Teams do well to stick to basic blocking and tackling.  I think this is wise advice for most teams. Scaling by […]

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Story Splitting (Feature Decomposition) Workshop

We have added a 1 day Workshop to many of our courses.  The one day is composed of 1/2 Day on Story Splitting. And 1/2 Day on Scaling.  This Workshop can be attended ‘alone’ (ie, you can take only this one-day workshop). What.  Story Splitting is always required. We always need smaller stories in the […]

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Frameworks to Scale Agile – Some comments

First, here is a page that starts to explain SAFe.  SAFe is one of the better known ‘scaling agile’ frameworks.  http://scaledagileframework.com/ You should also look at Larman and Vodde’s book: Scaling Lean and Agile Development.  (They have other books.)  Also see their LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) framework, here. Next, Jeff Sutherland and Jim Coplien and others […]

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What does the Scrum framework do?

To be honest, Scrum itself doesn’t ‘do’ anything.  Scrum is just a basic framework that gives you some practices, etc (and includes some values and principles).  It depends mostly on the people in the field, or, we might say, in the Team. Scrum will immediately help in some ways. But its main value, IMO, is […]

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Advice from an experienced successful PO

I was doing a course with Dave Muldoon in Ottawa. And Rich O’Grady visited us. He had become a very successful product owner in a difficult environment where others had failed.  He mentioned 6 ‘top tips’ that day, and then he wrote me explaining them a bit more.  What he wrote was pretty much what […]

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