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Courses We Offer

We offer many courses and workshops: Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) course – This is the basic course, which I recommend for everyone and for teams. We now almost always include a 1-Day workshop (on Agile Release Planning). I strongly recommend this. Occasionally, I offer a 2-Day workshop as well. Intermediate Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) course […]

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Lean-Agile Resources

We have put together some Lean-Agile Resources on these pages. These include:  books, articles, videos, blogs, LinkedIn groups, etc, etc. Please give us your feedback and suggestions.

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What is culture? When do we start to change it?

Some of us in the Agile community think:  an organization’s culture needs to change before agile can be fully adopted. This certainly seems to be true. Let’s define this more precisely.  The idea is this: Before a company can realize the full and extreme benefits of lean-agile-scrum, it must change its corporate culture to be […]

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Deliver Faster

Why do we want to deliver fast, and then faster? Well, the first reason is…that’s what the customer wants. The customer is thirsty. They want a drink now. She does not want to wait for 3 months to get a major delivery of 200 water bottles. A drink now, please. The second reason: time to […]

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Release Planning: Completing the Plan

[This post is one of a series on Release Planning. The series starts here.] As discussed in the previous post on Release Planning, the user stories are now ordered. Now we must complete the Release Plan. So, we must make the trade-off between scope and date. There are three ways to do this: 1. Fixed […]

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Self-organization of the Team

We have this idea in Agile, that the Team should self-organize.  This is an important idea. And, more, an important action of the Team. In Agile, self-organization is contrasted with command-and-control. We think self-organization is an important thing to study, both in general and in your Team. It seems simple, but like almost anything, to […]

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Enabling Specification

This is a “just enough, just in time” concept.  As some of you know, just-in-time (JIT) was one of the first names for what we now call Lean. Just enough documentation to enable the implementers to implement it, delivered ‘just in time.’ This is closely related to the “Definition of Ready” or DOR concept.  Which […]

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“Ozymandias” – Creativity can take some courage

It is hard sometimes to be creative, to create.  We wonder, will our creation ever survive.  I have spoken already of a book called The Courage to Create by Rollo May. Here is a short poem by Shelley, Ozymandias: I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of […]

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The importance of a real team

Scrum requires a real team. The word ‘team’ is often used, often in different ways.  So, let us define it. According to “The Discipline of Teams” by Katzenbach and Smith, this is what you should look for: 1. A meaningful common purpose that the Team has helped shape. 2. Specific performance goals that flow from […]

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Meet the Meeting Killers

Here is an entertaining article in the WSJ.  About the types of people who kill meetings. Scrum of course has some meetings. It is trying to minimize meetings, and make meetings better. But as soon as you have people and meetings, you can have some….umm…interesting times.  So, may your meetings not be interesting this way. […]

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