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 […]
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Example Mapping: Your Secret Weapon for Effective Acceptance Criteria
Example mapping is a collaborative technique for a team to take a User Story (or PBI) and have a deeper conversation to clarify their understanding of it. The conversation generates the Acceptance Criteria. (Acceptance Criteria is the generic idea – Example Mapping is the approach I generally recommend.) We need an example. Let’s pretend that we’re building […]
Collaboration, Over Work in Isolation
When I’m working with new Scrum Teams and say that Scrum encourages collaboration among team members, everyone nods and smiles. When I ask them to describe their actual collaboration, I hear about collaboration in Sprint Planning, Review and Retrospective. If I’m lucky, someone mentions solving impediments found in Daily Scrum through collaboration. Wow. Jaw drops. […]
A Rebuttal of Groupthink
In a New York Times article: “The Rise of the New Groupthink” this week Susan Cain claims that teams and collaborative work give rise to groupthink. Groupthink is not out of the question, as Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons demonstrate in “The Invisible Gorilla” group think is a risk – cite the example of the […]