Like most consultants, I consider myself highly motivated. I’m motivated by solving complex problems and moving on to solve the next complex problem. My natural inclination is to go hard, go fast, and not stop. That works for me. But does that work for my clients? Much more often than not, it doesn’t. In fact,…
The Agile community talks a lot about delivering Value and I mean A LOT. The first Principle of Agile has been “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software” and couple with the 7th principle “Working software is the primary measure of progress”, we see why in general…
“Scrum is founded on empirical process control theory, or empiricism. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is known. Scrum employs an iterative, incremental approach to optimize predictability and control risk. Three pillars uphold every implementation of empirical process control: transparency, inspection, and adaptation." (Ken Schwaber and Jeff Southerland,…
The Product Owner (PO), is a position created during the early years when Scrum was conceptualized. The role and responsibilities materialized out of a reaction to heavy, big, up-front, rigid requirements gathering within traditional, heavily predictive, "waterfall" project management frameworks. It is one of three main roles within Scrum: Development Team, Scrum Master and Product…
Retrospectives are incredibly valuable and if you’re not doing them regularly, you’re doing yourself and your team a great disservice. Assuming that your teams are actively engaged in development activity, you may not be maximizing the value to its full potential. Great retrospectives can rapidly turn a good team into an even better team, but…
How organizations or enterprises define the roles and responsibilities of the Product Owner (PO) and how they organize their resources can vary. The factors that influence this decision are numerous, and these variables certainly can change over time. But, generally how the PO position is defined hinges on the type of organization: Software Product Organization (SPO; i.e. Amazon)…
Are you a lean-agile thinker? Do you want to be? Who are Lean-Agile Coaches and what do they do? Let's take a look at the role of Lean-Agile coaching and lean-agile thinking; starting with the "lean" side of things. Quality Systems thinking was introduced by Edward Deming in the mid 1950’s and 1960’s. While shunned…
With so many Agile methodologies out there it can be really tough to know which is the right one, and picking the right one is absolutely critical for your project. It’s critical because each has it’s own niche and each comes with it’s own weight and cost. It is so important that I can’t say…
Traditional project management places a strong emphasis on comprehensive metrics. The general thought is if you can’t measure it, then you can’t control it. While comprehensive metrics has its place, it’s often overused and adds unnecessary weight and complexity to a project. Our experience is the larger the organization, the more layers of metrics there…
Ah, the age old Agile question: what is the appropriate amount of documentation? The Agile founders gave us the 4 Values and 12 Principles which have guided us from the beginning, and time has proven them to be great guides. The second item in the Agile Values states “Value Delivered Over Comprehensive Documentation.” This value…
