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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...

No…as long as the Team meets ALL of the following three preconditions listed below, a full-time ScrumMaster is most likely unnecessary. The Team is learning from their mistakes and refining their performance as they go. The Team is learning and adapting to the...

“The only ‘thing’ capable of dealing with complexity is human beings” This is the central thesis of Niels Pflaeging’s book, Organize For Complexity: How to Get Life Back into Work to Build the High-Performance Organization, and speaks to the...

Today at Agile Open Northwest, I had the opportunity to learn more about FAST Agile, a new, lightweight approach to scaling Agile teams from Ron Quartel (@agileAgitator).  You might remember Ron from my articles on twenty-eight way to stop wasting time at work (part 1 and part 2)...

One of the greatest challenges to trust, collaboration and self-organization in the workplace is visibility.  This is because most of software development is intellectual work without physical representation.  We take complex ideas on what a software product should do and express...

“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” With that classic throw back to the 1980’s, let’s wrap up our conversation on what are the key question to raise when being asked to dispatch help to Waterfall Island.  This entry is a continuation of an...

“Mayday!  Mayday!  We are stuck on Waterfall Island!  Please send help immediately!”  If you received this alert, how might you respond to the citizens of Waterfall Island? At the Scrum Gathering in Phoenix, Peter Stevens from Switzerland offered this provocative list...

Then you need to play Fearless Journey, a game to restore your hope.  In my last post, I introduced the game Fearless Journey and shared how the objective of Fearless Journey is to discover a new reality that is transformational in nature.  Normally, we focus on the little...

“That is just the way things are around, best to get used to it.” “If you could fix that, things would really change around here, but that won’t ever happen.” “If it were up to me, I would let you visit the end users, but it is not me you have...

“The major problems of systems work [software development] are not so much technological as sociological” First published in 1987, Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister were some of the earliest people to think of software development primarily of a human challenge rather than a...