Blog: Agile & Business

John Kotter Explains the 8 Steps to Create Successful Change

May 8, 2012

Here is a slide show and voice over by John Kotter (our best expert on change) talking about how to get organizations to change.  Watch and listen here.  [This was a link, and it is broken now.]  About 7 minutes. [We can send you now to the 8 steps page at Kotter International.] Here is […]

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Taking Ideas on a Test Drive

May 7, 2012

I am a strong proponent of “show me the money.” In other words, there are lots and lots of ideas that sound good. And only a relative few that are really worthwhile. And we only know which are which by …taking an idea for a test drive. But even this basic scientific idea is not […]

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A list summarizing Scrum

May 6, 2012

The list below is not self-explanatory, but it covers the key ideas one has to know and execute on to do Scrum professionally.  Of course, becoming proficient at doing them at the highest level (at the rugby World Cup level) is a lifetime’s work.  Rugby is a simple game with simple rules, but to reach […]

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Release Planning: Effort (1)

May 6, 2012

[For those who have not been reading here before, this is a continuation of a series that starts here.] Now we move on to Effort in Release Planning. *** The title of this blog post might be misleading.  Estimating the effort of a full Release per se is not quite what we want to do. […]

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Agile’s broad adoption and mediocrity – what to do

May 5, 2012

Ken Judy has an excellent, although blunt, blog post here: http://judykat.com/ken-judy/agilescrumlean-broad-adoption-mediocrity-faul/ His main point maybe is that we do not have enough truly professional scrum (or agile) implementations. And why? Because we have implemented too broadly too fast.  Is probably the main reason, in his opinion. Some good insights.  Read them. *** Here are my […]

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Six Myths of Product Development

May 2, 2012

Here is an HBR article : Six Myths of Product Development.  By Stefan Thomke and Donald Reinertsen. Here are the fallacies (or myths) in one list: High utilization of resources will improve performance. Processing the work in large batches improves the economics of the process. Our plan is great; we just need to stick to […]

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Release Planning: Business Value

April 30, 2012

[For those who have not been reading before, this is a continuation of a series that starts here.] Now we move on to Business Value in Release Planning. As Yogi Berra said: “You have to be very careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.” If you are in […]

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The Team and Introverts

April 28, 2012

I have several friends who are introverts.  And, as I get older, I recognize my own introvert side. And I appreciate it more, and accept it more. (The MBTI says I am an extrovert.)  It is to one introvert friend that I dedicate this post, a friend who has given me so many insights into […]

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Agile Principles and Values

April 28, 2012

In the post linked below, Jeff Sutherland wrote, apropos the Agile Manifesto, a bunch of things about some key Agile values and principles.  Excellent stuff. As some of you know, I think it is essential for people doing agile or scrum to know and be in sync with the values and principles. What I call […]

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Release Planning: Product Backlog

April 27, 2012

[This post is one in a series on Release Planning, which starts here.] After we complete the Vision, we must develop the Product Backlog. There are two parts to this. First, we must define the Roles to use in the User Stories. Second, we must write User Stories.  I call this second part a User […]

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