Archives

“Leader’s Guide to Radical Management”

I just got a copy of “The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management” by Stephen Denning. I recommend it. It is not so hard to learn Scrum and apply it to one team, but I always hear that, in any large-ish organization, “We need to change the culture.” OK then, one way is to read and […]

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Creation myth

It is Sunday morning as I write. I like to read different bibles, from different cultures. It is my intuition that while they are all different, they are also all trying to give us pointers towards the truth. Sometimes the pointers are a bit rusty and bent, but if we use a bit of imagination […]

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“The bad news does not get better with age.”

“The bad news does not get better with age.” I use this phrase, this key principle, several times in my Scrum courses. I say: “Women get better with age, Wine gets better with age And cheese gets better with age, But the bad news, in our business, does not get better with age.” Digression: Some […]

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Lessons from the trenches (of Scrum)

I was talking to a great person at a firm that will not be named. He is in charge of a large implementation of Agile for a large group within a much larger organization. They start their teams with Agile (Scrum) training and a hands-on workshop, and also provide coaching to each team from a […]

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Leadership – 2

“To lead people, walk beside them … As for the best leaders, the people do not notice their existence. The next best, the people honor and praise. The next, the people fear; and the next, the people hate … When the best leader’s work is done the people say, ‘We did it ourselves!’” — Lao-Tsu […]

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Loneliness

I have a book by Rollo May that I have barely started to read: “The Courage to Create.” This seems to me an important topic, creativity, because hopefully it is what I am training teams to do — to be more creative — and what he says is that it takes courage. One aspect of […]

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Leadership – 1

Takeuchi and Nonaka have written an article on “The Wise Leader” in the Harvard Business Review. (May 2011). Since they are the godfathers of Scrum, one feels compelled to discuss leadership in the context of Scrum. First, we must note this is a big topic, and with somewhat different issues depending on the size of […]

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Giving context

I am in Norfolk and the weather is foggy, and I am thinking about how best to do Release Planning. More specifically, how to plan for a big two-year project where everyone is used to a waterfall approach. So, here are some thoughts. Our problem is like being lost at sea in a fog — […]

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Agile & Religion – 1

I heard recently someone comment: “Well, watch out for those guys who get too religious about Agile. We don’t want that around here.” This general topic gets talked about in the Agile community a lot, and, I think, often ineffectively. But I think it is a difficult topic. It is hard to explain the issues […]

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Scrum and Release Planning

I went to the Agile Ottawa group last night. Mostly I very much enjoyed the meeting — a lot of smart people, a lot of good discussions, but… A Sad Tale A gentleman there, a serious business guy, new to Scrum, said something like this: “It seems to me that Scrum has no up-front planning, […]

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