In every Scrum class I get asked how to deal with interrupt-driven work. Scrum is very effective when dealing with planned work, but what about unplanned work that appears during a sprint? Can we use Scrum to deal with both plan-driven and interrupt-driven work? Yes, if…
Most organizations that employ agile ways of working, like Scrum, focus on self-organizing teams. In these organizations, operational decisions are delegated to teams, whose members have the most detailed knowledge of the consequences and practicalities associated with…
“Cash Can’t Code!” A colleague of mine (Chris Conrad) once told me this. The context of our discussion was about leveraging more resources to complete a large book of work by the end of the year. His main point is clear, having money to throw at the problem wasn’t going…
As an agile coach I work with many companies and the terms “cross-functional” and “T-Shaped” get tossed about quite a bit. Do they mean the same thing? Certainly, many people use them synonymously.
To avoid confusion when organizing agile teams and larger agile…
In this article I want to focus on the distinction between structural and instantiated dependencies. Most of the dependency management recommendations that you encounter deal with instantiated dependencies. However, the larger return on investment will be achieved by…
In the first article in this Dependency Series, I discussed how shared dependencies are a critical factor that impact success when attempting agile at scale. In this second article I discuss the economic consequences of dependencies.
This article is the first in a series on the topic of dependencies and how to deal with them to achieve successful outcomes when utilizing agile at scale. In this short article I will define what I mean by dependencies and emphasize that shared dependencies are the ones…
A feature team is a cross-functional and cross-component team that can pull end-customer-valuable items from the product backlog (i.e., “features”) and complete them. One approach to creating feature teams is to combine people with experience in each of the components…
Have you found yourself in a situation where a decision has to be made and the people involved believe there to be only two choices? The decision could be as simple as “Do we go out to dinner or do we stay at home?” Or, “Should we build Product A or not?” Typically,…
From an agile perspective, we never let an important assumption live long in an unvalidated or low-confidence state. The risk in doing so is that we end up making decisions or creating work products on top of the yet-to-be-validated or low-confidence assumptions that…