Years ago I used a slide in my training class that said, “For an organization to be successful with Scrum, it needs to have a safe environment.”
I remember in one class, a few guys at the back of the room start laughing when I showed that slide. When I asked why,…
Back in January, Ronnie Andrews Jr., host of the popular podcast All Things Agile, interviewed me about key concepts from my Essential Scrum book. Our conversation touched on many interesting topics, including the…
In the VersionOne 9th Annual State of the Agile Survey, 56 percent of the respondents cited “the ability to manage changing priorities” as a reason for adopting agile. That doesn’t surprise me at all, since more traditional forms of development are quite fragile to…
Agile development teams are cross-functionally diverse and sufficient. They are comprised of team members that collectively have the skills to get the job done. But how do teams deal with the variability of the work they are asked to do from sprint to sprint? For…
In the mid-1990s I was hired as an executive (director level) into IBM. My group was a services group chartered with developing solutions using object technology for IBM’s clients. During my tenure, we grew to have about 150 people in the group. IBM insisted that we hire…
Growing up I used to watch reruns of the TV show Hogan’s Heroes, a comedy about a fictional Nazi P.O.W. camp (Stalag 13) that houses prisoners who assist the Allied war effort from within the camp.
In Season 2, Episode 8, “A Klink, a Bomb, and Short Fuse,” an unexploded…
One team, one product, one product backlog. Release planning on that scale is simple! Let’s see why. Take a hypothetical project where we estimate about 200 points worth of work in our product backlog. Assume that our team’s average velocity is 20 points per sprint.…
As I engage different teams I have noted a lack of clarity surrounding product backlog concepts. Although there is no universally accepted vocabulary for labeling product backlog-related things, there should at least be agreement on the basic concepts. The goal of this…
This blog is the sixth in a series about agile and risk management. The first five blogs are: