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. […]
Notes from a Tool User
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
5 Steps for Creating High-Performance Teams eBook
Certified Scrum Trainer Mark Levison has been around the block, more than a few times, and he was getting frustrated by what he saw happening in Scrum. When Mark is invited into businesses and industries to talk with Scrum teams, it’s typically with the request to help them do Scrum better so they can be more […]
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 […]
JIRA is Not Agile
Don’t confuse Agile tools with Agile values and principles. The tools only provide support for the Practices, Roles, and Artifacts of Scrum.