Many things can go wrong when organizations implement Scrum. And too often, the very leaders who pushed for an agile adoption are the ones who unwittingly create roadblocks and obstacles to its success. This article discusses 3 big mistakes I see leaders make when…
Planning for all contingencies in a complex environment is not realistic. Things frequently can and do go wrong. If all available resources have been fully allocated to complete the planned work, then when high-priority unexpected work (or more precisely, unplanned-for…
In the blog post, “Don’t Organize Around Projects! Choose a Better Unit of Focus to Eliminate Waste & Increase Agility,” I provided an overview of the desired set of characteristics for choosing an agile unit of focus—one that a company or organization could rally around…
When I engage companies on larger agile transformation efforts, one of the critical first steps is to define the proper unit of focus for budgeting, planning, and team organization. In this blog post I overview the characteristics that I use for determining a proper unit…
Recently I have had a lot of meetings and presentations with non-technical executive management where I describe the agile mindset. A core agile principle of this agile mindset is fast feedback.
In my presentations to technical people, I use technical examples to…
A sprint goal describes the business purpose and value of the sprint. The sprint goal is the foundation of a mutual commitment made by the development team and the product owner. The team commits to meeting the goal by the end of the sprint; the product owner commits to…
If your organization chooses to do either fixed-date release planning or fixed-scope release planning, you will want a way to communicate your team's progress throughout the release. Although any highly visible way of communicating progress is appropriate, many agile…
Organizations often find it useful to plan some distance out into the future. Perhaps their goal is deliver on a known future date (the most common agile approach). If so, then fixed-date release planning should be used.
If an organization has determined that the scope…
Whether your organization intends to deploy every sprint, every few sprints, or continuously, most organizations find some amount of longer-term, higher-level planning to be useful. I refer to this type of planning as release planning. If the term release planning seems…
When doing agile development with Scrum is there a project manager role? Formally, Scrum defines three roles: product owner, ScrumMaster, and development team. So, there is no specific role called project manager when using Scrum.
A common misperception is that the…