Formal Agile and Scrum training uses things like Story Points or T-Shirt Sizes for user story estimation. Although I have done lots of reading and training, I still have a hard time understanding how this would work in real life, given that it is very intentionally stated in the formal academic training that the Points […]
I was originally going to talk about organizational change management, and about the challenges faced and how to break down barriers and help organizations mature and innovate. But everything I was writing came across so dry and textbook-like, that instead I sat back and thought of a story to tell. So here it is. There’s […]
The chore I hate the most in my house is definitely laundry. It’s just never-ending, especially now that I have a couple of kids. It’s better now but it took some mental improvements to myself to get there. Mainly because I had to change my psychological approach. I used to see laundry as a TODO […]
So I’m reading The Slight Edge, a pretty awesome book by Jeff Olson, and it is dawning on me how his basic principles apply to Agile. One anecdote that he mentions several times is that when a rocket is flying to the Moon it is actually off-course for over 90% of the time. Now that […]
There is a strategic problem I’ve been wrestling with lately. It’s really just a question, albeit a complicated one. But I have really looked far and wide and been unable to find any good answers to the question, or even many people addressing it or even thinking about it. So to understand the question, let’s […]
Who really likes meetings? I mean, I’m sure some people do, somewhere. But it seems like a lot of people don’t. So many don’t, in fact, that Scrum and Sprints are designed to minimize meetings. But let’s look at the Agile Manifesto. It says, “We favor…” Individuals and interactions Customer collaboration Responding to change In […]
You can have fixed time and variable scope, or variable time and fixed scope, but a product owner can’t pick both. Lately, I’ve heard this quote several times. At first, it makes sense. A product owner/stakeholder can either tell the team the requirements, and the team can then define the schedule. Or the product owner […]
A recent discussion has come up in my organization. Three years ago we embarked on a “grand experiment”. We re-org’d into 2-pizza service/agile teams, committed to Scrum and DevOps and Agile, trained and hired, and sally forth! For some teams, this was a natural fit and it worked great. There were a couple of in-house […]
Why doesn’t the classic PMP process work with software? The official Program Management Body of Knowledge provides a well-defined process workflow for the initiation and execution of projects. At a very high level, the workflow is something like this: Define Scope -> Create WBS (deliverables list) -> Create Activity List -> Estimate Activity Durations -> […]
