Blog: Agile & Business

Giving context

March 22, 2011

I am in Norfolk and the weather is foggy, and I am thinking about how best to do Release Planning. More specifically, how to plan for a big two-year project where everyone is used to a waterfall approach. So, here are some thoughts. Our problem is like being lost at sea in a fog — […]

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Agile & Religion – 1

March 19, 2011

I heard recently someone comment: “Well, watch out for those guys who get too religious about Agile. We don’t want that around here.” This general topic gets talked about in the Agile community a lot, and, I think, often ineffectively. But I think it is a difficult topic. It is hard to explain the issues […]

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Scrum and Release Planning

March 10, 2011

I went to the Agile Ottawa group last night. Mostly I very much enjoyed the meeting — a lot of smart people, a lot of good discussions, but… A Sad Tale A gentleman there, a serious business guy, new to Scrum, said something like this: “It seems to me that Scrum has no up-front planning, […]

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Additional ideas: adopting lean-agile

March 6, 2011

This topic (adopting Lean-Agile) is being discussed here and many places. I think I will be discussing it with a senior executive in Canada on Monday, so, very pertinent for me and likely many others. A lot of smart people in that discussion (I know some of them personally). A number of great ideas were […]

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How to adopt agile?

March 6, 2011

In the Agile Alliance LinkedIn group discussions [around March 2011], there was a discussion about “How to adopt Agile in my organization?” by Mark Lummus. This is a complex topic, with many things to say. Here is most of my first post (in that group) about this. There are many other things I might have […]

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What we do…

March 6, 2011

Here is an interesting post by Daniel Glyde, about what his team does at www.wiggle.co.uk. Scrum, and….    

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Implementing Scrum when not everyone is a believer

March 3, 2011

How do you implement Scrum in an organization where not everyone is a believer? Umm. This is a common question and a hard one, and yet also easy. First, one misconception is that Scrum is a religion that only true believers practice it. Scrum is actually empirical. Now, it should be said that Scrum (and […]

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Scrum Prototyping, Sprint Zero (NO) and

March 2, 2011

I was talking with some smart people at a client’s location. They said: “We do a Sprint -1 where we do rapid Scrum prototyping. We do a Sprint every day, produce a new version of the GUI, etc., and review it with the customer team daily. It lasts for two weeks, or did last time. […]

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Innovation’s most important question

February 24, 2011

Steve Denning (a very interesting guy) tweeted about this article. The question (in the article) is: Is there a better way? Please read it. Nice story behind it. (Steve is a big proponent of stories. Google his books.) It’s actually useful if you want your team to be innovative. (You do want your team to […]

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Middle Managers and Scrum

February 24, 2011

In a lot of organizations I work with, we need to do a better job of explaining Scrum to the middle managers. Most of the people in the teams get Scrum and see benefits. Most of the senior guys see their metrics get better, and, if they focus on the right feedback, hear and see […]

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