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4 Announcements

We are happy to announce 4 things. 1. New LeanPub Book: Agile Release Planning. Some of you may have seen a prior draft. It is revised now. And published. I expect to have some further revisions.  I seek your feedback. You can see it here. 2. New Workshop: Story Splitting (Feature Decomposition) This is a […]

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More success with Scrum – How to get it

Fernando Cuenca has an excellent blog post, here.  He discusses what he learned at Agile 2013. I will summarize his teachings in my words. The ultimate question is: how to have a better life for yourself, your Team, and your Customers.  Specifically at work, using Scrum. Measure velocity.  Look for increases in velocity. Otherwise known […]

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Story Splitting (Feature Decomposition) Workshop

We have added a 1 day Workshop to many of our courses.  The one day is composed of 1/2 Day on Story Splitting. And 1/2 Day on Scaling.  This Workshop can be attended ‘alone’ (ie, you can take only this one-day workshop). What.  Story Splitting is always required. We always need smaller stories in the […]

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Impediments – From the Charlotte Class in Sept.

Here are some impediments identified in an exercise by the Charlotte CSM Class in September. Some duplicates, some overlaps. May this list make your Team more creative about identifying impediments. May it lead to your Team to fixing the highest priority impediment first. The List: Personal Agenda Hierarchical approach Understand tasks (tasks not understood, I […]

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Getting the right people in the Team – Richard Branson

For useful innovation, truly good and fast innovation, I think a Team is essential.  They must do knowledge creation in a Team. As Takeuchi and Nonaka have explained pretty darn well. A real team, not a group of individuals. As a friend just reminded me, probably the most important thing in getting a Team started […]

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Scaling: Don’t forget the Team

What do you have if you have good scaling but all the Teams are terrible?  Nothing. What do you have if you have lame scaling, but all the Teams are good?  Something that is still pretty darn powerful. *** What happens when ‘everyone’ is talking about scaling?  They forget about the Teams.  And the Teams […]

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Frameworks to Scale Agile – Some comments

First, here is a page that starts to explain SAFe.  SAFe is one of the better known ‘scaling agile’ frameworks.  http://scaledagileframework.com/ You should also look at Larman and Vodde’s book: Scaling Lean and Agile Development.  (They have other books.)  Also see their LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) framework, here. Next, Jeff Sutherland and Jim Coplien and others […]

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What does the Scrum framework do?

To be honest, Scrum itself doesn’t ‘do’ anything.  Scrum is just a basic framework that gives you some practices, etc (and includes some values and principles).  It depends mostly on the people in the field, or, we might say, in the Team. Scrum will immediately help in some ways. But its main value, IMO, is […]

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Starting agile adoption

Imagine that you have some interest in Agile. Perhaps you read a book, and talked with a friend who is doing agile at his firm. Then you take a Scrum course. Now what do you do? Let’s take a middle of the road case, where you have a software development group of 80 or so, […]

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The ScrumButt Test (4): You know who the Product Owner is

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

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