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Agile Leadership – 2

This series on leadership arises from a talk by Mary Poppendieck on Agile Leadership. See our earlier post. Now let’s consider leadership in Scrum — in theory and then later, in practice. We are reminded of Yogi Berra’s quote: “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.” (A nod […]

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Agile Leadership – 1 (Poppendieck talk)

I was pleased to help arrange a talk by Mary Poppendieck at Google in NYC last week. The topic was: “A History of Leadership.” The talk on video is here.  The slide deck is here. This is an important topic, and, if I may say so, Mary Poppendieck makes a number of great points. I […]

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Kaikaku or kaizen?

As you know, kaizen means continuous improvement. This means a bunch of small improvement over some period of time. Small continuing improvements have many virtues to recommend them. But what if we need a big change? What if we can make a big change? What if a big change is the only thing that makes […]

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Services We Provide

Excuse this short commercial advertising. (Some of you may want and need this information.) We provide Lean-Agile coaching. See here, or contact us (contact info is at that site). From one day to 400 days. This is what we do; we’re good at it. We do many varieties of coaching. We also provide Lean-Agile training. […]

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Up the creek without a paddle

My friend Mike Vizdos has a blog with cartoons called ImplementingScrum.com. His latest cartoon is titled “Up the creek. Without a paddle.” See here. The idea is that if you want a specific change to happen or even to stay, you have to keep paddling. Very simple idea. Very true. Agile (Lean, Scrum, XP, etc.) […]

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What is the scope of impediments?

Last night at Agile-Carolinas we had Israel Gat, VP of Distributed System Management at BMC Software. He spoke on “Leading the Disruption.” He is giving this talk also in Austin, TX (and maybe elsewhere). If you get a chance, I urge you to go, or just contact him. After that meeting, I had several conversations. […]

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The importance of Velocity

I had an interesting conversation about Agile metrics yesterday, and wanted to share one insight. Why is Velocity so important? Well, first, we should say that in many ways it is not. Honestly. Velocity can be unmeasured, used badly, up, down, sideways, misunderstood. Whatever. As long as the team produces some more Business Value (e.g., […]

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What is a ScrumMaster worth? (2)

Based on comments, I made a few changes to the original post, here. The specific numbers used in the post are not that important. The approach to logically identifying the value of a better ScrumMaster is. Take the approach, and fill in your own numbers. Help the right people think it through, using their own […]

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Your Business Case for Agile

My friends at Innovel have a blog entry titled “Build Your Business Case for Adopting Lean Agile.“ Take a look. As you try to get a revolutionary idea adopted, remember that you must always be selling the idea (see John Adams to the right). (Note: We didn’t have quite 50% of our countrymen agreeing, and […]

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Developer Abuse

Here is another video that talks about why we do Agile. This one and the one called “Being Agile is our favorite thing” were the top two vote-getters (from a perhaps somewhat-biased, large audience) at the Agile 2007 conference. It’s a bit serious, I think. Perhaps a bit overdrawn, but I do think developers have […]

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