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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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Being Agile is our favorite thing

Here is a fun video from Thoughtworks, titled “Being Agile is our favorite thing.” It might be used as some “evidence” to use to start a retrospective.

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The Nokia Test (4): You know who the Product Owner Is

In this series, we are going over each question in the Nokia Test. The first section of the Nokia Test is a quick determination: are you doing incremental development? Then second section is: are you doing Scrum? We are now up to the first question in the second section is: Do you know who your […]

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Mura, Muri, Muda

These are Lean words, in Japanese, and I always get them confused, especially the first two, so I am doing this post partly to remind me what each word means. They are all in the negative. Mura: Unevenness of flow. Thus, the first thing to do is establish a reasonable pull, an even flow. Muri: […]

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Two cheers for the Nokia Test (2)

A comment by Kelly Waters and a discussion yesterday with Peter Smith prompts me to comment. Some are attempted to come up with a long list of all the practices involved with Scrum (or Scrum plus other parts of Agile), and then score each team. I don’t think the long list replaces the simple short […]

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Two cheers for the Nokia Test

I am an advocate of the Nokia Test, up to a point. Why do I like it? I think it is a simple way to set some sort of lower boundary on Agile (Scrum) and it tends to make two problems more visible: Cowboy Agile on one side and Agilefall (aka Wagile) on the other […]

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The primacy of learning

More and more I am taking the view that learning is the central thing about business. What does this mean? First, learning by itself is not that meaningful. It is learning combined with action. The simple dichotomy (between thinking and action) is really not so simple. For example, one of the best ways to learn […]

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