Yearly Archives: 2016

Scrum 201 Course: Agile-Scrum to the next level

I have a Scrum 201 course coming up in Atlanta. This is important, needed and useful. Why? Why Scrum 201? Lots of people have tried Scrum and everyone gets some reasonable benefit. But, you may not have gotten nearly the benefits possible.  So, the purpose of this course is to enable you to get much […]

List of Courses and Workshops V12

Some of you may have seen our prior list of courses and workshops. Scrum 201 was added — we did this one year ago with Jeff Sutherland, and the need for it continues to grow. Many of these courses and workshops are available publicly, or could be scheduled anywhere if there is some interest.  Five […]

2014 State of Agile Survey

Here are the survey results from Version One on the state of Agile. A pretty good job, I think. Many interesting observations in the survey. Let me highlight one. Under “Barriers to Further Agile Adoption,” the top three answers were: 44% ability to change organizational culture 35% not enough personnel with the necessary Agile experience […]

Release Planning: Summary of our blog posts

Here are the main ones, in order. Joe’s Approach to Agile Release Planning Release Planning: Vision Release Planning: Product Backlog Release Planning: Business Value Release Planning: Effort (1) Release Planning: Effort (2) Release Planning: Risks, Dependencies, Learning, MMFS and Other Release Planning: Completing the Plan Refactoring the Release Plan Some additional related posts: Agile Release […]

A list summarizing Scrum

We have a slightly improved version of our ‘List Summarizing Scrum.’ Not many changes, but a few minor ones. A list summarizing ScrumV6. How can this be useful? First, it is only a list, and prints onto one page (front and back). Two proposed uses: 1. Visit a team, and discuss the list fairly quickly. […]

Q: Becoming a good ScrumMaster

Q: “What is your advice on becoming a good ScrumMaster?” A: This is a good and difficult question. The difficulty is where to start and how best to express it. First, what is a good ScrumMaster? What makes one better than usual? You may think it odd, but the first thing I want to say […]

Scrum makes work a Game.

You know, of course, that Scrum is named for the Scrum formation in rugby. Generally, Takeuchi and Nonaka were inspired by the ‘rugby’ they saw in several great companies and how they created new product innovation. Sutherland and Schwaber read that article in HBR titled “The New New Product Development Game.” That was a key […]

Wide-Band Delphi Estimation for Business Value – 3

This is the third in a series of three.  See Part 1 and Part 2. ____________________________ How can we use the BV points? We could organize the Product Backlog strictly by BVPs, at least initially. In fact, I recommended this, to see patterns or to make any mistakes obvious.  Put the story cards in rows […]

What is Scrum?

Note: This is the first in a continuing series of posts re Scrum Intro. I am starting a series of posts to explain quickly what Scrum is. It turns out that Scrum is very simple, and yet difficult to explain concisely. The main purpose of this series is to give my course attendees a bit […]

“It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world”

I suppose we can all agree, after reading any newspaper, that the outside world is… mixed up, muddled up and shook up. Do we let ourselves see that this is also true of the world and the people immediately around us?  And maybe — ah! — even ourselves? Agile and Scrum are ways to work […]