Scrumerati

Scrum

2012-02-07T12:00:00-08:00

Scrum is an agile project management technique with high transparency, adaptive control, reasonably accurate release forecasting, and high productivity. It helps organize efforts involving teams and creativity (including software engineering, product design, venture capital management, charities, civic organizations, marketing communications, etc.). Because Scrum exposes managers and team members to greater visibility and accountability than traditional waterfall approaches, and because it requires different management structures, some organizations encounter resistance implementing it. Scrum focuses on management, so it can be combined with field-specific agile techniques, such as Extreme Programming.

Release Duration and Enterprise Agility: Global Webcast on 7 Feb 2012

2012-02-01T15:33:09-08:00

Short release durations help companies test market theories to maximize profit. When managers measure release duration and advocate its reduction, they drive changes that improve the long-term productivity of the company. Join me on February 7, 2012 at 11:00am EST, for a Scrum.org Global Webcast on release duration. Register now at https://www3.gotomeeting.com/register/332472046.

Proposed: Agile Abandonment Disorder and its Root Causes

2012-01-16T05:30:00-08:00

Jeff Sutherland, Scott Downey and I have found over the past few years that, more often than we wished, companies sometimes abandon agile methods. In our observations, it hasn't been because agile was performing badly; to the contrary, for the...

Could Your Company Lose Agility? Adaptive Portfolio Management can Help

2011-12-29T11:43:55-08:00

Agile methods create conflict. So to retain agility, we must actively promote it even after agile has taken hold. How can we equip a company with the cultural and process tools to sustain agility? Your choices may depend on your perspective. Social psychologists teach organizations to reinvent themselves, but this approach may be too slow for a large company. Change agents study, develop and evangelize specific processes, a more promising approach. "Adaptive portfolio management" is a specific process under development that may help sustain agile-thinking. It maximizes value by rapidly adapting to market and company changes. In using adaptive portfolio management, company leaders exercise agile fundamentals. They can become agile advocates for the whole organization, making agility more stable for developers on the ground.

Review: Liz Keogh, Learning and Perverse Incentives

2011-07-11T05:00:00-07:00

Liz Keogh, Learning and Perverse Incentives, QCon London 2011 This 50 minute talk discusses perverse incentives: situations where incentivizing individual behavior causes an organization to become dysfunctional. When we attempt to optimize an organization, but fail to use systems thinking...

Is Hiring More the Right Answer?

2011-03-14T05:00:00-07:00

In my current company, I sometimes here people say “We need more people to handle this workload.” Every group in the company considered in isolation could use more people, no matter what group they are in; at least that's what...

Quality is Not Negotiable? A Contrarian View

2011-02-21T12:38:27-08:00

In Martin Fowler's blog post, Tradable Quality Hypothesis, he reiterates the oft-repeated agile cliché that “quality is not negotiable.” I argue that making quality inviolable lets engineers off the hook for understanding and prioritizing quality efforts.

Review: The World is Not Small for Everyone

2010-09-27T03:00:00-07:00

In “The World is Not Small for Everyone” [sing10], Singh, Hansen and Podolny thoughtfully explore how limited access to knowledge hobbles peripheral, junior and female employees. Surprisingly, in all three of these cases, self-reinforced isolation seems to interfere further with access to experts and referrals. Agile methods may mitigate some of these problems.

Learning Science and Agile Training

2010-09-20T04:00:00-07:00

New cognitive psychology results can help us provide better training. Trainers seek to transform the way you think about tasks, motivation, planning and outcomes, and equip you with enough understanding to succeed. My Scrum Trainings are done in the afternoon, reinforcing learning by exploiting sleep cycles. Further ideas include changing venues from day-to-day, varying ways of applying agile thinking to problems, etc.

Meeting Scrum: Part 1, Make Information Flow

2010-09-13T04:00:00-07:00

Meeting Scrum can make long meetings, trainings, and workshops more agile. When Scott Downey came to town, I used Meeting Scrum to bring Scott in as part of an in-progress 16 hour Scrum Training. It made the training more spontaneous and showed the highly adaptive nature of agile methods. Part 1 of a multi-part blog post.