25
2013“Jeopardy” Retrospective Game
Have the group write down just the answers to questions that they think up. They do not reveal those questions, and the answer shouldn’t of course indicate the question directly. For each ‘answer’ ask the group to suggest what the...
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15
2013Finish All Work Every Iteration
“After I’ve finished this story, I’ll pick up story #1354”. Trouble is that #1354 is a 5-point story that will take two people two days to complete…and there are only two days left on the iteration. This is known in...
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09
2013Committing to Value versus Committing to Stories
I know…this is heresy you are thinking – Stories ARE Value. How does this even make sense? I suggest that teams try to think about committing to delivering a full set of value every iteration. This means focusing in one...
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08
2013Agile Development versus Agile Delivery
While I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the project Governance, and how Agile fits into the organization’s governance structure, I’ve become to believe more and more that Agile isn’t a software development framework at all really. Its actually a...
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08
2013Commitments – Rewards and Penalties
One of the problems that teams can easily fall into is that after a while the team stops feeling the pain of missing commitments. The commitments becomes aspirational goals that somehow don’t seem to get reached … “well we tried,...
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05
2013Cider House Rules
June 5th was my first retrospective with the team since being appointed as their Scrum Coach. One of the main challenges that the team had was that as a ‘NICE” team, they had fallen into a culture of group-think and...
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09
2012How to make the T.E.A.M work for you
Throw away those personality tests and group therapy sessions. Getting your team to be highly performing is as simple as T.E.A.M. T is for Talk E is for Engagement A is for Accountability M is for Measurement Find ways to...
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09
2012Using the Right Metric for the Job
Its a management truism that you get what you measure, so it is important that you know the difference between the various types of metrics, and when to use each one. The four primary types are: Measures of Activity: Is...
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08
2012Facilitation – 8 Do’s, 5 Don’ts
It started out promising enough. “The topic is ‘Scaling Agile’ – there is no agenda but we’ll bring our collective experience and knowledge to the table and have a deep, meaningful conversation about how we can scale Agile”. After that...
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25
2009Toyota Production System – the Foundation of Scrum
Introduction The Toyota Production System (TPS) is the cornerstone of Lean Management. It is best described as: “an Operations Management System to achieve goals of the highest quality, lowest cost and the shortest lead-time via engaging people towards goals.” Ironically,...
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