Monthly Archives: September 2013

Advice from an experienced successful PO

I was doing a course with Dave Muldoon in Ottawa. And Rich O’Grady visited us. He had become a very successful product owner in a difficult environment where others had failed.  He mentioned 6 ‘top tips’ that day, and then he wrote me explaining them a bit more.  What he wrote was pretty much what […]

Adopting Agile: Ask questions

Some of you know I like Yogi Berra.  As a side note, here are a lot of his quotes. I hope you laugh at a few. (Laughter is a great way to influence people.) Ok, so Yogi Berra reminded us by saying: “Some people, if they don’t already know it, you can’t explain it to […]

What’s wrong with that impediment list?

Let’s pretend that the impediment list I just posted (the one from the Charleston class) was a real public impediment list for your team. What would be wrong with it? First, the most important thing to say is: GREAT!  Finally, a public list of key things to work on.  And, if we worked hard on […]

Impediments: from the Charleston CSM class in September

As you may know, I think in Scrum it is key to aggressively attack impediments. I think each Team should have a (mostly) public impediment list. The SM should be attacking the top impediment each day.  This ‘kaizen’ should lead to improvements in velocity. Every Team can get better. Always. An impediment is anything (anything!) […]

Scrum is Hard! (Scrum is fun!)

The classic phrase from Sutherland and Schwaber is: Scrum is simple, but Scrum is hard. Yet, with almost any decent Team, Scrum is fun. Unless the personal chemistry is dysfunctional. So: If I don’t warn you that Scrum is hard, I am lying. But if I don’t ‘warn’ you that Scrum will be fun, I […]