Category Archives: managing agile

Starting an Agile Transformation

Imagine you are a medium-sized company. Your innovation team might be in the range of 300 people. You are not a start-up, and equally, you are not a huge company. Let’s imagine, at least for now, that you have no special issues. Your situation is fairly normal. (To be fair, every situation is different to […]

Read More »

Topics for the Executives (managers)

I was brainstorming what kinds of topics or exercises the executives (or senior managers) need. This also includes things for the managers close to teams, but it is not especially for them. OTOH, we’re not addressing the CEO of JP Morgan Chase, either. In an example with that kind of firm, we mean the ‘executive’ […]

Read More »

Getting Started with Scrum

Let’s talk about the basic standard patterns in getting started with Scrum. (We have talked about these ideas before, and so we have many, many coaches and advisors.) Start a pilot team This also means pull together a team with the best possible criteria for success. These criteria are worth reviewing in more detail later, […]

Read More »

The A3 Approach to Kaizen

In every class, I teach the A3 approach to Kaizen. Kaizen is usually translated into English as ‘continuous improvement.’ In Scrum that means ‘removing impediments.’ The first thing to note is that it is an approach.  It is a method, with certain values and principles, and the fundamentals of the approach are more important than […]

Read More »

Executive Action Team

Jeff Sutherland has defined an Executive Action Team. This is similar to the Management Scrum idea that I discussed. You will also notice that Ken Schwaber and Mike Cohn have described roughly similar ideas to what Jeff is describing. (I will look up later the names they gave to those teams.) Jeff Sutherland’s idea is […]

Read More »

Management Scrum Team – Part 4

This is the last of 4 parts. See here for the first part. Links to all four parts are there, or search to the right. __________________________________ Retrospective. Again, telling the truth here can be difficult. The whole MST comes to this meeting at the end of every Sprint. For a two-week Sprint, maybe two hours. […]

Read More »

Management Scrum Team – Part 3

This is the 3rd of 4 parts. Part 1 starts things. ________________________________ Now we come to a harder meeting. The Sprint Review. It is hard because no one in this team is used to showing anything completed in two weeks. They are often used to showing Powerpoints. Vaporware. “Thoughts.” With knowledge workers or managers, when […]

Read More »

Management Scrum Team – Part 2

Part 2.  (See here for Part 1.) Now, the work of the Sprint needs to be defined in small ‘stories.’ To me, for two weeks, eight stories for a team of seven is about small enough. Team. Did I mention that this is and should be a cross-functional and multi-functional team? The ‘people’ within the […]

Read More »

Management Scrum Team – Part 1

This is an important idea that more and more people are talking about. One reason: Managers need to learn about Scrum. They can take a course, but they also need the ‘reality’ of being in a real Scrum Team. (Real does not have to mean a software dev team.) Another important reason: Managers can be […]

Read More »

Short Scrum and Long Scrum

There are many ways to play Scrum. In some sense, Scrum is infinitely flexible. Let us pretend for a moment, there are only two types of Scrum, which I will call Short Scrum and Long Scrum. Short Scrum In Short Scrum, a Sprint might be completed in one day.  So, we do not have a […]

Read More »