Blog: Agile & Business

Renewing Your Certification

February 4, 2021

Updated: August 31, 2023. Cut-to-the-chase: Your key takeaway may be: Re-Take the CSM or CSPO with Joe because simpler and “cheaper”. Explained in section 3 below. *** Should you renew your Scrum Alliance certification?  Yes! I think it helps, it increases your knowledge, it should enable you to do Agile better with your Team, and […]

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Agile Release Planning – Questions

January 31, 2021

QUESTIONS Joe – during an agile release planning session how long do you estimate it will take for Business Sponsors to point approx 50 stories? Actually, I’m estimating we will need 32 stories for 6 months. Yes, I’m looking to hold an ARP at the end of Feb for 1 feature. Thanks, Craig REPLY First, […]

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BV Points – 1

January 31, 2021

QUESTION Hi Joe – reading your ARP book, and you talk about BV and highest number is 100. But, what is the harm in using regular 1,2,5,8,13 Fibonacci numbers for business value? I do get when you find R that it will be lower. R = Bv (5) / SP (5) would mean an R […]

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What is the problem set?

January 31, 2021

You have probably heard the recommendation: solve the right problem. Often in new product development, we think of this as the customers’ problem. And then we have ideas, from Lean and elsewhere, such as: root cause analysis – the idea that the customer presents with a symptom(s), but the root cause is not so obvious […]

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The illusion of control

January 31, 2021

Daniel Mezick has a good post in LinkedIn today: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/danielmezick_the-command-and-control-military-gets-agile-activity-6761443011659370496-itMo About the illusion of control, and the idea that control is an emergent property.  (There’s that darn word emergent again.)  See the article he links to: “The ‘Command and Control’ Military Gets Agile.” https://www.infoq.com/news/2010/06/c2-military-gets-agile/ *** Some quick thoughts. Of course it is an illusion that […]

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New “Refresher” course policy

January 29, 2021

We are introducing a new policy. For a very low fee, you can take ANY course again. Rules: It must be a course or workshop you have taken before (eg, per Scrum Alliance).  And that we give Any instructor.  You could have taken the original course with any instructor. You must have completed the original […]

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When NOT to scale

January 27, 2021

We had a great webinar yesterday on this topic. We defined scaling (which has many definitions) as 3 Teams working together on the same “product”.   Here are the drawings and some related slides: Not_Scaling_Jan_2021_2021-01-26_15.01.41 This is PDF of drawings on the iPad Not Scaling – 4 ideas V2 PDF from Keynote   Enjoy!

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Webinar: Two Patterns for Managers in Agile

January 24, 2021

This is another in our Webinar Series. Date: May 27, 2021 (Thursday) Time: 2 pm EDT, 1 hour. Link: (to be added — where you can register) We will discuss two patterns for how managers should interact with Team. For senior managers: The Executive Action Team. Many people have had this idea.  Jeff Sutherland prefers […]

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Some tools for Agile

January 8, 2021

Here are 4 tools I have been using in my courses.  And recommend, for you to use with your Teams. Microsoft Teams I am about to start using Microsoft Teams. They have added break-out rooms.  I think they work well enough for me. Lots of integrations.  But they make it easy (fairly easy) to start […]

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Get them Climbing again

December 17, 2020

It is typical for a Scrum team to start Scrum, get some improvement, and then plateau. That is, find some comfortable level of productivity, and just flatline there. Which I guess is fine, if that level were as good as that Team could do. But the level isn’t, and as they say, anyone can see […]

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