In our Scrum Alone is Not Enough discussion on Portfolio Management, we talked about what it is, and how the use of a Portfolio Kanban Board can help visualize challenges that are inhibiting work, including with parallel teams. That was tricky enough, but now let’s tackle an even bigger challenge: managing work that happens before […]
Scrum
Kanban Portfolio View
(Presented as Part 3 in the Scrum Alone is Not Enough series.) In the last post of this series I talked about Portfolio Management, and how it aims to ensure that a team is always working on the highest priority work, without outside pressure taking their focus away from a manageable goal. Portfolio Management has […]
Portfolio Management
(Presented as Part 2 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. In many organizations, we see common challenges: […]
Characteristics of Effective Scrum Teams
Grouping individuals together doesn’t make them a team. It takes more than just a label to turn a collection of people into an Effective Team. In 1993, Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith published, The Wisdom of Teams[1], which highlighted the difference between Working Groups and Real Teams. In this article, we summarize Katzenbach and Smith’s […]
Agile Tools for Job Search – An Evolving Post
In recent months I have seen hundreds of people on LinkedIn and other places, who have been laid off. I see many people encouraged by well-intentioned, helpful outplacement services to tweak their resumes to get ingested by a ranking tool. If you’re lucky this might result in an interview and in some rare cases a […]
Onboard New People Without Losing Scrum Team Magic
Agile teams have been struggling since the earliest days with how to bring new people on to a team. In one of the first Agile books, there was a story of Alistair Cockburn walking a new hire through the team’s flip charts and telling the story of their work. I haven’t seen a team use […]
The Modern Guide to the Daily Scrum Meeting
Many people who attend Scrum training courses start with the impression that the Daily Scrum is the whole of Scrum. Others think the Daily Scrum centres on three questions (this was true a long time ago). This guide to the Daily Scrum meeting was created to address these misconceptions as well as answer common questions. […]
The Sprint Backlog: A Truly Complete Guide with Examples
We might not be able to make Sprint Backlogs exciting, but we can make them more effective. Let’s look at what a Sprint Backlog is, what purpose it serves, and how to create, manage, and improve it. What is a Sprint Backlog? A Sprint Backlog is a list of Product Backlog Items (PBIs) that the Developers think they can complete during the […]