Archives

Kanban – Love it. Why?

I have been working on Kanban lately. I love the Lean ideas.  There is so much we still need to do and understand better.  Interestingly, the ideas are counter-intuitive to most people yet, obviously simple and powerful when you take some time to do them. The one sentence version (hugely over-simplified): For most people, I […]

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Southern Fried Agile – Proposed topics

Some of you may find interest in the topics I proposed for Southern Fried Agile.  I may or may not ‘get’ any of these…. Culture, Change, Scrum: What we can do about it This is an evolving topic for me.  I spoke on this same basic topic last time, and people seemed to be pretty […]

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Velocity: What if a story is partially completed in one sprint?

Question: If you had a user story (Story X) with four Story Points at the start of the Sprint, which was not completed by the end of the Sprint but the majority of the work was done (e.g., just two small bugs remained), would you recalculate the Story Points when adding this into the next Sprint […]

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Is It Really important to estimate initial velocity?

Question: “Is it really important to have a SP estimate before the first Sprint starts?” I think he means an estimate of the initial team Velocity before the first Sprint Planning Meeting. Answer: The short answer to his immediate question: Yes, it is important. Why? It makes it a tighter meeting (SPM, Part 1), and […]

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What to tell the Executives – Part 2

Last week I discussed this issue with the Agile-Carolinas group.  Wonderful conversation.  Many great comments. One thing I was struck by was that there are many many different types of situations.  And that we need to address, possibly, many different things, depending on the situation (including the people). In the session, I focused on the […]

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Agile Velocity | Estimating Initial Agile Velocity

Agile Velocity by Lean Agile Training Here is a method for estimating initial Agile Velocity that may work for you. I expect you to use it in the context of Agile Release Planning. (Anything useful should be credited to Jeff Sutherland; any issues should be credited to me.) First we take some assumptions or identify […]

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The Retrospective and uncovering the best impediments

I chuckle when I say ‘best’ impediments.  Because, by its nature, an impediment is something that is slowing the team down.  It is ‘bad.’ But, to get better, the Team must focus on the most important things first.  And this is true for impediments.  We must fix the most important impediment first. It is human […]

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Agile Reading for Executives

A recent email I sent, slightly edited. ____________________________________ Dear Mike and Mark, You asked for something to give the executives and managers. I might send them “The New New Product Development Game” article (see below), with a short explanation. And then, offer these other things to review. Other options: “Software in 30 Days” by Ken […]

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What is culture? When do we start to change it?

Some of us in the Agile community think:  an organization’s culture needs to change before agile can be fully adopted. This certainly seems to be true. Let’s define this more precisely.  The idea is this: Before a company can realize the full and extreme benefits of lean-agile-scrum, it must change its corporate culture to be […]

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The ScrumButt Test (3): Enabling Specifications

The third line in the ScrumButt Test is: “The Sprint starts with an Enabling Specification.” What does this mean? The first practical goal was to eliminate the analysis paralysis and delay associated with waiting until the specification was “complete”. On the other hand, too many agile teams are trying to be effective when ‘no one […]

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