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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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One reason for “Business Value Engineering”

I said recently that business value engineering is the place we can improve the most. By this I mean: (a) identifying the small features that the customer will want the most (once they get them), and (b) identifying the MMFS (minimum marketable feature set). Perhaps we should also add: (c) identifying a “business model” that […]

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Scrum Team in Waterfall Land! What to do?

The real question sent to me was: What are some tips for integrating our SCRUM model with non-Scrum groups who will not be adopting the process? One can go many places with this question, and there could be other questions within this question. For now, let me answer two questions. 1. In general the culture […]

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Getting Higher Velocity – Take 3

A recent conversation leads me to discuss some basic issues. Why do we care about velocity? To be honest, higher velocity is less important than higher business value. Higher velocity going the wrong direction does not help at all, and can hurts. We always need more clarity on: (a) what the customer will really want […]

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Paying for Courses

As a reminder, we posted about the issues in Paying for Courses a while ago. We wanted to remind people of the problems that can arise, especially with paying with a credit card via the internet.  It can be a problem, and it can seem insurmountable at the time. But actually it is usually very […]

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