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05
MAR
2024

Avoiding the Middle Management Diffusion Layer & Other Ideas…

How do you run an Agile team when the surrounding environment is decidedly non-Agile, i.e. the rest of the organization has not adopted the Agile Mindset and still retains the Industrial Mindset (waterfall)?  This was a topic of discussion in a recent Lean Coffee session and here...
02
NOV
2018

Agile Retrospective Framework in Five Steps

Did you know that every well-run Retrospective follows five steps?  In my experience, the best Retrospectives follow this outline first created by Diana Larsen and Esther Derby in their book, Agile Retrospectives.  Here is a summary of each stage. Set the Stage:  setting the...
27
SEP
2018

5 Steps to Better Scrum Team Agreements

Working Agreements are one of the core compacts that all good Agile teams need and use. For those of you unfamiliar with Working Agreements, they are nothing more than agreed upon protocols created by the team govern their interactions and clarify expectations. They are different...
06
SEP
2018

What is Coaching? (Cheat Sheet Provided)

Coaching is a distinct and powerful skill from the eight other essential skills of a Certified Scrum Professional (CSP).  Because coaching is an overloaded word in the English language, let me provide some guidance to describe what I mean when I am referring to coaching. For me,...
26
FEB
2018

Play with Story Cubes & Write Better User Stories at XP 2018 Porto

February 2018 Lisbon, PT – Great news for people who want more from their user stories and for people looking to have more fun at work with Serious Games.  Carlton Nettleton will be taking his insights, ideas and Story Cubes® to help Scrum practitioners, Product Owners and...
29
NOV
2017

Want More Sad People At Work?

If the Team is not committed\bought in on using Scrum, will it work? No.  However, this is going to be true of any process you might adopt – Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming (XP) or traditional project management.  If the your team members are not truly curious to learn...
28
AUG
2017

How to manage documents? Should that be a new story?

Continuing with our discussion of documentation, I wanted to address how we actually build these documents within our Sprints (or iterations).  Remember our key Agile principles related to documentation: “working software is the primary measure of progress” and...
03
JUL
2017

How does the traditional functional and technical documentation work in Agile?

In Scrum and Agile, there is not much guidance given on functional and technical documentation.  The Agile Manifesto states that Agile teams value “working software over comprehensive documentation.”  That provides clear guidance on what is the focus of an Agile team,...
06
MAR
2017

Best Ways to Motivate Team Scrum Members

Stop doing things that demotivate people! Seriously…there are a lot of silly things that people are expected to endure in big companies that are severely demotivating. Almost all of Peopleware is spent identifying how common practices in software management demotivates...
28
NOV
2016

Estimating the Size of Scrum User Stories

In Scrum, the owner of the estimates is very clear.  Only the people who do the work, i.e., the Team, have the right to offer estimates for the Product Backlog and Sprint Backlog items.  However, like many things in Scrum, the framework leaves it up to each Team to decide on what...