Yearly Archives: 2016

Questions: Agile Release Planning

Question: Hi Joe! Hope you are well. We are cranking up the Agile Scrum. I know you are likely very busy, and I tried to find answers to my Agile Release Planning questions below, but I am not finding what I am looking for on the net. That said, I have three quick questions that […]

HBR on Agile! May Issue.

The Harvard Business Review has three new resources on Agile now. The original classic article is “The New New Product Development Game” by Takeuchi and Nonaka. The first of three new resources is here. This is by Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland and Hirotaka Takeuchi. Rigby is with Bain, Sutherland is the co-creator of Scrum […]

Stop Starting, Start Finishing

The phrase in the title is a well-known Agile phrase, but perhaps not well-enough known. In one way, it is saying: minimize WIP. Work-in-process or work-in-progress. In another way, it is saying what my friend Mike Vizdos says: Focus. #Deliver. _____________________________________ But let me tell a story that gives a different meaning. A few months […]

The Team sucks, the Backlog sucks, the Done Done sucks! I know! Let’s scale that!

I just led a discussion with Agile Charleston on this topic. The idea for this topic comes from a talk by Mike Cottmeyer at the Scrum Gathering in Orlando. I agreed with Mike that these three are three of the most common problems with teams, and they are fundamental. (One might argue that X is […]

Scrum 101

Here is the slide deck I used in the talk with the Agile Halifax group. Scrum101.key You can see slides from other talks I have had here. Enjoy!    

Scrum 201 Course – Why?

Why the ‘Scrum 201’ course? Problem: This course addresses two problems. (A) how to get more success from Scrum (B) how to advance your career We are finding far too many teams are only getting 20% or so improvement with Scrum. This is by far too low. One way to address this problem is more […]

Jeff Sutherland Google Talk (2014) on “Scrum” (book)

Here is a fairly recent Google Talk by Jeff Sutherland. (Late 2014.)  The talk gives some key ideas from his recent book, “Scrum.” The talk is long, about an hour, but you can stop it any time.

Getting Started with Scrum

Let’s talk about the basic standard patterns in getting started with Scrum. (We have talked about these ideas before, and so we have many, many coaches and advisors.) Start a pilot team This also means pull together a team with the best possible criteria for success. These criteria are worth reviewing in more detail later, […]

Lean Agile Open – April 15, 2016.

[Ed. Note: This was written 4/16/2016.  We have had many Open Space events since 2016.] We had a great event in Charlotte yesterday, and I hope you did not miss it. Self-organizing people did the best they could (which is actually a lot) to learn as much as they could with other smart people about Lean […]

The A3 Approach to Kaizen

In every class, I teach the A3 approach to Kaizen. Kaizen is usually translated into English as ‘continuous improvement.’ In Scrum that means ‘removing impediments.’ The first thing to note is that it is an approach.  It is a method, with certain values and principles, and the fundamentals of the approach are more important than […]