Inspect and Adapt: An Introduction to Agile Planning
Don’t make the hardest decisions at the dumbest point (ie. the beginning) in your Agile planning process. When we first start on a project, we rarely have a complete idea of what it takes to create a truly great product. There is always unexpected feedback or requirements that enter the picture. In Agile, we plan […]
Top 5 Causes of Sprint Carry Over
Most teams say they are doing Scrum, but they really aren’t. One of the core elements of Scrum is something called the Potentially Shippable Product Increment (PSPI), or getting to Done Done. Having an increment of your code/product potentially shippable at the end of every Sprint is the key to becoming predictable. And becoming predictable […]
Story Mapping 101
Traditional product backlogs can get confusing. They typically start off with a high-level list of features, called “epics”. However, as the team starts decomposing the epics during refinement down to sprintable user stories, it’s easy to “lose the plot” and the only person with the decoder ring is the Product Owner (PO). The PO is […]
Advancing Agile By Evolving The Manifesto
The Agile Manifesto was created over 15 years ago. Most of the focus in the Agile/Scrum world since then has been to improve product delivery; we have fixated on how we make the development of ideas more effective. We have improved idea development in the following ways: Increased Visibility – We can see our work, […]
Invest, Don’t Budget
Many organizations we work with are very budget-driven. Many organizations do up front funding and budget management. This process feels good, as having a plan provides clarity and accountability. However, this type of process leads to very bad behavior because of a few huge, and often, bad assumptions:
Is ScrumMaster Really A Full-time Job?
Let me ask you this: If you had a team of five would you rather have 20% annual gain without adding another developer, or go hire and integrate a new developer every year to get a 20% productivity gain YoY? If it was up to me, I’d go with option one and make sure that […]
The User Story Needs A Remodel. Here’s Why.
User Stories have become the standard way Agile teams capture requirements and were introduced almost 20 years ago as a part of XP (Extreme Programming). To put it in context, that’s four presidents and 14 iPhone models later. A lot has changed and it’s time we upgrade how we define and communicate work for […]
Agile And The Middle Manager Identity Crisis
Going Agile causes a lot of change within an organization, from a process, strategic, and cultural standpoint. A side effect of the Agile adoption is the confusion regarding roles and responsibilities, particularly for middle managers. For middle managers, everyone is telling you what not to do, but no one is telling you what to do. […]
21 Flavors Of ScrumMaster Role Combinations – Pros and Cons
In the perfect Agile world, a ScrumMaster is a ScrumMaster…and that’s it. There’s not a never-ending custody battle where a person goes back and forth between two roles. Unfortunately, we live in the real world. Often, people come to our CSM workshops with a divided workload and wearing different hats: Product Owner and Manager or […]
Your Sprint May Be A Mini Waterfall If…
If your Sprint begins with two days of design followed by six days of development and finally two days of QA, each phase stacked right behind another like dominoes, then congratulations…you have a mini waterfall.