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Contradictions

I have been noticing the contradictions in Agile and Scrum lately. Jeff Sutherland recently did a post about persuasion. The latest post might be summarized as: “To persuade you must be confident and humble.” I guess no contradictions there, but he does talk about contradictions elsewhere. And this quote has been bouncing inside my head […]

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Is Agile useful now?

You may have noticed a few not-entirely-happy things happening out there in the economy. It might even have affected you and perhaps even your place of work. So, in what ways is Agile relevant now? First, Agile is even more relevant now than before. (OK, just my assertion so far; see below.) Second, for reasonable […]

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Should we invest in a better Product Owner?

I won’t bore you with the calculation, but if you assume that a better Product Owner can: increase the value of Product Backlog items (stories) in the ‘project’ by 20% on average identify the Pareto curve partially in the Product Backlog, so that an 85-33 rule applies And if we assume that the team costs […]

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The great persuader is you

Last night I was speaking to the Metrolina PMI chapter. Good discussion; lots of interest in Agile. My topic was: Winning With Scrum. So, on that quickly. My experience and my hypothesis is that Scrum can be more fun and can enable your team(s) to be much more productive. It is designed to allow you […]

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Productivity Now

The economy is in a bit of a tailspin now. We can help ourselves. If you wait for the Wizards of Washington to help, you might wait for the wrong team. How do we get ourselves out of this jam? We need a simple way, a simple feedback loop, for telling if we are productive, […]

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Business Value Engineering

Business Value Engineering? What is that? Well, we mean all the practices and work-methods around assuring that more and more Business Value is being delivered to the customer, and the firm satisfies all its constraints (e.g., good return to shareholders). This is based on a key Lean idea. We are trying to optimize the end-to-end flow of […]

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What to do first?

I just got an email from someone who recently went to one of our Scrum courses. (Note: This is a long but, I think, interesting post. Bear with it if you can.) QUESTION: Hi, Let’s say one is going to work as a team lead for a software project in an organization that currently does […]

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The Nokia Test (6): Estimates created by the team

Another installment on the Nokia Test. Before we begin, a quick mention that Jeff Sutherland has done an improved scoring on the Nokia Test. See here. So, the next item on the test says: “The Product Backlog has estimates created by the team.” Why is this important and what does it mean? Meaning first: So, […]

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Agile Portfolio Management — 2

OK, so we got started earlier. This continues an earlier post. What next? Ummm. One of the goals of Agile Portfolio Management is making sure the most important things are done first. And that all of us are only working on the highest priority things. And Agile Portfolio Management should try to achieve that goal […]

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Agile Portfolio Management – 1

A few people have been asking about “Agile Portfolio Management,” or at least, “How do we manage this stuff?” What they mean is what I call Agile Portfolio Management. Agile Portfolio Management is of course distinct from Scrum, but for simplicity, I have assumed a Scrum context. First, Scrum is relatively silent on this subject, […]

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