Archives

Committing for the Sprint

This is, to me, still a New Year.  A friend suggested I discuss New Years’ resolutions.  Or something like them, Sprint commitments. Henry Ford said: Whether you think you can or you can’t, you are usually right.  So, let us work backwards. To me, in most business situations, the main thing is satisfying the customer. […]

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Are managers evil?

Managers, they say, are often bad in the US, and in the world. And there is some justification for this. And, of course, most managers are not evil.  Although, like many of us, many might be badly trained. Some background Peter Drucker worked on this problem of managing.  W. Edwards Deming had his ideas, and […]

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Product Owner & the Team

Is the product owner a member of the team?  Yes, fully and completely. What is the biggest problem that most teams face? At the high level (value) or the low level (details), they don’t understand what the customer wants well enough. Who is mainly responsible for managing the flow of this ‘business information’ into the […]

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Why call it “BV Engineering?”

A man I greatly respect wrote to ask why I call it “BV Engineering.”  There are many engineering disciplines, he noted, but is there a degree in “business value engineering”? I said I thought an MBA was the degree for this. Not another regular engineering degree,  but I agree with him that for some the […]

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Scrum & Kanban

Jim Coplein today posted a very interesting post on Jeff Sutherland’s Scrum Log.  It’s title is: An Alternative to Kanban: One-Piece Continuous Flow. In the piece, Jim discusses the definitions and merits of Scrum and Kanban. This is a subject about which I too have some passion.  While not as talkative as Jim, I will […]

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Scrum teams and living in packs

My experience with people doing Scrum is that we tend to take the “man is rational and isolated” hypothesis too easily.  Often it is not a thoughtful choice, just the implicit assumption of the way we are thinking or the way we speak. Isolated and individualistic are key words. If you believed in them, you […]

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More about distributed Scrum – one example

Let’s talk about distributed Scrum using one example. There are so many situations and variations for distributed Scrum.  And, hence, many different suggestions, depending on the situation. One example Imagine you are the head of technology, in the US.  Imagine you have customers in the US, and your business people are in the US, and […]

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3 Drivers of productivity with Scrum

One question is: “How important is Scrum anyway?  I mean, it is always the team that does the work, whether they use Scrum or not.” And this is true. But I do think most teams (if not all) that use Scrum give themselves a big advantage.  They are more likely to be more successful if […]

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Better distributed Scrum

I was asked today for my main suggestions for getting better at distributed Scrum. Suggestion 1. Make a fair comparison between distributed and collocated in your specific situation. a. Cost per hour, usually lower for offshore people. b. Hours of “distributed” members, usually more. c. Hours for “local” members, usually more. d. Net effect on […]

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One reason for “Business Value Engineering” – 2nd pass

Let’s say some smart people have given you some great ideas about “business value engineering.” Let’s say those ideas include: More customer demos Having the implementers visit the customers as they “do work” or “live” (depending on your product) A better BV Model Don’t talk to customers (they don’t know they want an iPad) Taking […]

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