Archives

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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Acceptable Interruptions – Toward a better Daily Scrum

As many of you know, Scrum has a Daily Scrum or stand-up, where the team syncs up quickly (in 15 minutes). For some reason (or perhaps a variety of reasons), many teams either don’t get the value or take too long, or both. So, to make your Daily Scrum better, consider a couple of questions. […]

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Some video resources

Lachlan Heasman commented on a post, reminding me of some great video resources. For now, I’ll just mention the two of which he reminded me. There are earlier posts with other videos. Ken Schwaber talking about Scrum at Google. As I commented to Ken, good for lots of companies to know that Google is using […]

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How to learn more about Lean-Agile

Several people who have taken recent courses have asked: “Where do we find a discussion group where we can learn more about Agile?” Here are some answers: First, find local people. Agile Alliance has a list of agile groups. In fact, the Scrum community has identified its community more broadly and specifically, here. [Not sure […]

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Suggested Resources for attendees at the Jim York Certified ScrumMaster course on Dec 4-5

Here are some suggested resources that came out of a Certified ScrumMaster course that Jim York and I just led. Books On the Web http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/ http://www.planningpoker.com/ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/scrumdevelopment/ — The Scrum-Dev Yahoo discussion group. Enter with salt.   Articles “New New Product Development Game“ by Takeuchi and Nonaka. This is the article that directly led to […]

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The Nokia Test

Nokia (the cell phone maker) uses Scrum. Well, actually it is/was a small Euro 50 billion joint venture called Nokia Siemens Networks. They have developed a test to check whether a team is really using Scrum or just doing what I call Cowboy Agile, or doing Agilefall (talking Agile terms, but really doing mostly waterfall). […]

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Carnival of the Agilists – 11/29

Once again we are pleased and humbled to be included within the Carnival of the Agilists collection of blog posts. See here. For all the prior Carnival of the Agilists selections, see here. Enjoy. These are recommended. This is not to say that I would agree with every word of every post, but “two heads […]

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“You can observe a lot by just watching”

As some of you may know, I am a fan of Yogi Berra quotes. The guy is amazingly smart, and by saying some things in a ‘stupid’ way, he makes you laugh and the lesson sticks a bit more. Since he was a coach, I can also relate. One of his quotes is: “You can […]

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