Companies are starting to fall into a trap, and it goes something like this, “Our partners/competitors/… are Agile, so we need to be Agile.” Becoming Agile without a valid reason will harm your organization. I can’t state that any simpler. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, rival manufacturers often visited Toyota plants, and Toyota was delighted […]
Taking Organizational Improvement Seriously – Case Study
(Presented as an accompanying case study to Part 4 in the Scrum Alone is Not Enough series.) In the previous post, we discussed how it’s not enough to practice Scrum at the Team level and expect that it will solve all problems. Senior Management has to get involved for real Agile change to happen and […]
Taking Organizational Improvement with Scrum Seriously
(Presented as Part 4 in the Scrum Alone is Not Enough series, and accompanied by this worked example of Organizational Improvement in WorldsSmallestOnlineBookstore.) If Agile change initiatives don’t produce at least the doubling in productivity that is possible, it’s often because Scrum is used as a wrapper around the current state of work, but the organization […]
Scrum Without Removing Impediments Isn’t Scrum
Mechanical Scrum Versus True Scrum – What’s the Difference? Recently I was talking to a friend about their company’s implementation of Scrum. They don’t see the point. Before Scrum was implemented, they often had to wait an hour or more to access a test machine. After several years of using Scrum, it’s still a problem. […]
Vision to User Stories – What is the Best Flow?
In a recent Product Owner Course I was asked to provide a picture of the flow from Vision to User Stories, with all the steps in between. I think the attendee was hoping for something like: There are a couple of challenges. Scrum, being a framework, doesn’t tell the Product Owner or the Dev Team […]
Portfolio Management – Idle Teams
(Continued from Portfolio Management Part 1 in the Scrum Alone is Not Enough series.) Imagine that the Portfolio Management group is giving the individual Product Owners a budgetary envelope of an approximate size. As Product Owners, we expect to make small bets on individual User Stories that will deliver value to the customer. The Portfolio Management group […]
Portfolio Management
(Presented as Part 3 in the Scrum Alone is Not Enough series.) As mentioned in the introduction to the Scrum Alone is Not Enough series, Scrum is simply the framework and, to work best, other tools and patterns need to be incorporated to build the most effective systems. Portfolio Management is one of those things […]
Software Development is Not a Form of Construction
For years the software industry has used an analogy, with construction as its defining metaphor. The comparison is applied throughout the language of software: architecture, foundations, constructor, projects, building code. The language is so pervasive that it affects our thinking around software development, but unfortunately the metaphor is fundamentally broken and the flaws have led […]