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Who should fix Impediments?

In the Certified ScrumMasters LinkedIn group, Michael asked: Who should fix impediments, the SM or the Team? His answer was: Both. And then he discussed.  This topic has drawn a fair number of comments.  Here is one of mine. *** 1. Michael is right. Who should fix the impediments and how much the Team should […]

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More on: The Product Owner and the Team

There has been some interesting discussion on this topic recently.  Two things I wanted to add to my prior post. 1. The business side cannot force the Doers to “do all that I say” in the Sprint. This is of course a well-known rule of Scrum. But this rule does not eject the PO from […]

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We must have working software at the end of the Sprint!

This is a common failing (we don’t have working product or working software at the end of the sprint).  Jeff Sutherland has said this is the biggest problem in the Scrum community — too many teams don’t have working software at the end of every Sprint. If we include cases where 1 or more PBIs […]

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Business Value Engineering framework

I am about to do another BV Engineering workshop. In Orlando, Feb 23-24.  Preceded (appropriately) by an Intermediate CSPO (Product Owner) course. Feb 21-22. In this post I wanted to explain the workshop from a different angle that I have done before. First, what is the BVE framework? Scrum is a framework.  Not a full […]

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An Intro to BV Engineering: the paper

I have written version 2.2 of a paper that introduces the concepts around Business Value Engineering. See: http://agileconsortium.pbworks.com/w/page/28278924/Intro%20to%20Business%20Value%20Engineering I would appreciate your feedback, either here or in an email. Thanks!

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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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Public Impediment List !!! – 2

There is a good Scrum trainer who thinks that a public impediment list is not important.  So, if he can misunderstand, then we all can. Here is a better explanation of why it is important, I hope. I find the lack of a public impediment list is a prime indicator of a lack of focus […]

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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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