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Toward a general theory of Business Value

The title of this post is a little highfalutin, but it gets the idea across I hope. After many discussions with people about this subject, I find that the words “Business Value” tend to mean something very narrow to most individuals. For example, the words often mean, mostly: “the numbers we put on the story […]

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Suggested Resources for CSM Course NYC Feb 28-29

Here are some of the resources we mentioned in the course. First, a suggestion and two cautions. Suggestion: Always tightly link thinking and action. Caution: “Words, words, mere words, no matter from the heart.” W. Shakespeare Caution 2: “Of making many books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” […]

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Business Value and Money: Killing Low Priority Projects

This topic is leading somewhere. It may take a few posts to fully get there. First, let me say that in my personal opinion (and Peter Drucker’s and many others’) business is not mainly about money. Money is a measure, but it is not why we run the race. Business is about delivering satisfaction to […]

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The Nokia Test (2): Working Software

The second line in the Nokia Test says: Software must be tested and working by the end of each iteration. This is the second of three items that confirms the team (project) is “iterative.” There is a series of small tests (within the Nokia Test) if the team is really doing Scrum (in Nokia’s opinion). […]

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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 […]

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5 Whys: To get better, ask why.

If you have a 2-year-old, or remember one; you are familiar with the word “why.” Repeatedly. Now, here is a more adult way to use that word. Lean tells us we should ask “why” all the time. In fact, the Five Whys to discover the root cause of a problem so we fix it once […]

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The Concept of “Ba”

“Ba can be thought of as a shared space for emerging relationships.” This is a quote from Nonaka’s paper called (surprise): “The concept of ‘Ba.’” Why is this important? Takeuchi and Nonaka work at a famous business school in Japan. They have been working on New Product Development to understand how and why some firms […]

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Little’s Second Law: “People are remarkably good at doing…”

Little’s Law is justly famous. I highly advise that your firm think about it, and use it as a justification for reducing the number of projects “in the system,” and also to justify having team members only work on one project. There are other reasons to do this, but Little’s Law is enough. Now I […]

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How to measure success on agile projects from a customer point of view

This topic is a thread on Scrum-Dev (the Yahoo list) these days. Excellent topic, with many good posts. Go and see. This is an involved topic, so I will give some views in this post and more later. I start with the word “measure.” I am concerned that we are measuring too many things (not […]

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The Nokia Test (1): Iterations must be timeboxed

I will be doing a series of posts that discuss each element in the Nokia Test (see earlier post). In this first post, we will focus on the first element in the Nokia Test: “Iterations must be timeboxed to less than six weeks.” First, remember that the first section of the test is to determine […]

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