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. […]
Scrum
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 […]
Scrum Alone is Not Enough
To be successful with Scrum in the long term you need more than the basic framework. This is intentional. Scrum provides the structure as a starting point, but it’s designed to work well when applied with other effective patterns. Like the Design Patterns movement of the late ’90s, a pattern can be used by itself […]
Welcome to the High-Performance Teams Game
Your team is working on the World’s Smallest Online Bookstore, a site that provides the best results (just a few) for every search, not every result on earth. We’re a vulture capital funded company, so if we don’t deliver, our funding will be cut. So begins the opening of the High-Performance Teams Game. My goal […]
It’s not Scrum if…
A lighthearted look at what can go wrong when Scrum is misapplied. Without spirit, passion, and engagement, things go sideways.
Early Feedback Reduces Anger and Frustration
Have you seen a developer react after they’ve spent three days writing a feature, only to have the tester say, “Um… no” in a Post Mortem (a meeting about a project after it has finished) that went badly wrong – with lots of finger pointing and anger? Recently in a CSM Class an attendee helped […]
Scrum by Example – Stop Digging New Holes
Our case study Scrum Team is accumulating Technical Debt and needs to adjust Velocity and review Definition of Done, Unit Testing and Restructuring Legacy Code.