All articles in Blog

Agile Management, Blog

Are You a Scrum Master? Be a Gardener.

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I have recently been reading Jurgen Appelo’s book Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders. For those wondering what management’s role in an Agile organization should be then this is a good read.

In my current consulting gig I am coaching someone to replace me as a scrum master so we spend a great deal of time talking about Agile, Scrum and what it means to be a scrum master.

One of the things I have always used as a metaphor is the concept of Scrum Master (and managers) as gardeners. Though I may have heard it somewhere and forgot it or it may have reached my subconscious somehow, I came up with the metaphor of gardener because my in-laws live with me and are retired. They spend a great deal of time gardening. It is from their work bringing forth trees, flowers and mountains of vegetables that I took my cue.

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Blog

Product Versus Project Management

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I spent a great deal of time trying to find others who have written about product versus project management, especially as to how it relates to Agile. Unfortunately, it is not a hot topic. This is a shame – it should be.

I have had the pleasure of working with teams and organizations that are successful with Agile and others who are not that successful. Those that are not successful are those who cannot see a difference between product and project management. While the differences may be subtle, it can make all the difference in the world.

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Agile Transitioning, Blog, Scrum

What Agile Processes and Diets Have in Common

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I have spent a great deal of time lately reading blogs predicting the end of Agile. There are a lot of good people making a lot of good points but I think that there are some major problems the arguments predicting the end of Agile.

There is a very real tendency for people to confuse Agile (the philosophy) with Scrum (a process created to achieve the principles of Agile). Agile is only 16 statements – 4 values and 12 principles – nothing more. Of those 16 statements I am sure that there are some who would argue against them, but these would be a fringe element. Don’t believe me? Follow the links above and see which, if any, a rational software developer or business person would disagree with. You can disagree with them, but principles, in and of themselves, cannot fail.

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Agile Transitioning, Blog, General Agile

The Fourth Agile Principle

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“Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”

I was in a backlog grooming meeting this morning when I was given reason to reflect on this, the fourth, Agile principle. The reason was that the team I was working with was struggling/arguing about the proper wording of a story. To a few on the team the absolutely precise wording of the story was of paramount importance. While I am a big fan of precision, the vehemence of the need to be precise was a bad smell. It took me some time to realize where the stridency came from.

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Agile Development, Blog, Leadership

The Reason Your Agile Implementation will Fail

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I have had the good fortune of managing Agile (scrum) implementations at a number of different companies over the years. I have had some great success and some implementations that were not so great. While not unique, my experience is such that I have enough data points to start seeing patterns, especially patterns of failure. That is, while I cannot confidently tell you what will most certainly work in your particular situation, I am eminently qualified to tell you what will not work.

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Blog, Scrum

Not Burning Down? Diagnosing and Fixing the Some of the Problems

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Of course you would not expect every sprint to have a perfect burndown. You would not expect to complete every story in every sprint (my goal has always been 90% or greater stories complete), but if you are finding yourself with many “overhanging” stories each sprint there are a number of things that you can do to diagnose and fix the issue. In this particular post, I am going to discuss problems with time and hours.

There are three things that can go wrong with hours:

  1. The number of hours the individual estimates for capacity is too low.
  2. The number of tasks identified is incorrect (not enough tasks identified).
  3. The number of hours associated with each task is too low.

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