Open Agile Adoption
Open Agile Adoption is an ‘open’ approach to adopting and evolving agile, eg, in a given company. By ‘open’ we mean that we are getting the people that will be ‘changed’ to engage in designing the change. We do not mean total chaos. Management might establish some ‘guardrails’ (eg, we will do the basics of Scrum, but exactly how should we implement...
Question: How do I implement Scrum?
Question from Denise: My organization has decided to go from Waterfall to Agile SCRUM. I have experience with SCRUM, but very little experience implementing it. I was wondering if anybody has this experience? If so, what were some of the challenges you faced? Lessons...
Agile Reading for Executives
A recent email I sent, slightly edited. Dear Mike and Mark: You asked for something to give the executives and managers. I might send them “The New New Product Development Game” article (see below). With a short explanation. And then offer them these...
Planning Poker Tools
Mike Cohn has the phrase ‘planning poker’ registered. So, this is acknowledgement of that. And, like Kleenex, that’s what we call the thing itself. It no longer has a generic name. And, as some readers know, I like Priority Poker too. So,...
What does it mean to be ‘Ready’?
Jeffry Hesse wrote this blog post. And it inspired me to write the post below. The new Scrum Guide says that PBIs (product backlog items) must be well-understood and granular enough (just before going into) for Sprint Planning. And that PB Refinement is the process...
Scrum Values
All of you should be aware of the Agile Manifesto and the Agile Principles. To me, they are not perfect, but they are an excellent expression of many of the key ideas behind Agile. And we should be thinking about them every day. They require thought and common...
SAFe, LeSS, DAD, and ScrumPLOP
First, I wanted to say that I feel each ‘large scale agile’ situation is different. The key problems are different. And therefore, the solution(s) should be different. And I like the idea of patterns. This is the patterns idea: “Here are some...
Why I prefer ‘Release Plan Refactoring’ to ‘grooming’
I was just doing a course with Dave Muldoon in Canada. One of the workshops was scaling. In that context, we discussed release plan refactoring or product backlog grooming. To me, the Scrum community has many definitions of ‘product backlog grooming.’...
What is culture? And 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...
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,...
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 learnings in my words. The ultimate question is: how to have a better life for yourself, your Team, and your Customers. And then, specifically...
Starting agile adoption
Imagine that you have gotten some interest in Agile. Perhaps you read a book, and talked with a friend who is doing it at his firm. And 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...
Scrum is Hard! (Scrum is fun!)
The classic phrase from Sutherland and Schwaber is: Scrum is simple, but Scrum is hard. And yet, with almost any decent Team, Scrum is fun. Unless the personal chemistry is dysfunctional. So: If I don’t warn you that Scrum is Hard, I am lying. But if I...
