Over the last few years I have found myself drawing the same Scrum diagram on the whiteboard over and over again. A simple, no-frills, diagram that shows the basic ideas of Scrum. This is that diagram.
Author: Chad Albrecht
Over the last few years I have worked with teams that feel a need to using Branching as part of their “best practices” tool set. The ALM Rangers were even nice enough to show teams how to build a mature branching scenario in their Visual Studio Team Foundation Server Branching Guide 2010. PROCEED WITH CAUTION! … Continue reading Branching and Merging–Proceed with Caution!
Betting on a greyhound race can be tons of fun. You find a cool sounding greyhound, check the stats, then lay down $20 to win. (or some other bet variation) We are ecstatic when our greyhound wins, collecting our money and touting the prowess of our keen eye for the stats. When we lose, we … Continue reading Corporate Greyhound Racing
Inspired by Michael Dubakov's article Flow. Discover Problems and Waste in Kanban, I thought I’d spend some time looking at Value Stream Analysis. We talk a lot these days about delivering value to our clients, but many of us don’t understand the details of how that is accomplished. Sure we understand that raw ones and … Continue reading Analyze your Value Stream, A Quick How To Guide
For those of you who haven’t been to the Perot Charts site, have a look. It has a great collection of visuals that pertain to our economy. This one caught my eye: Picture source: http://perotcharts.com/2008/05/the-nations-healthcare-dollar-2004/
I have founded or co-founded a number of startups, worked as a consultant for Fortune 100 companies, and been an executive in large corporations. What I’ve come to hold true is that as a company grows it experiences what Dr. Larry E. Greiner calls “growth phases.” Dr. Greiner postulated the existence of these phases in … Continue reading Company Growth
I’ve talked about using your Value Proposition(VP) to rank features by dollar value here and using Ideal Days to estimate duration here. Now let’s combine the two and look at total value based prioritization of features or PBI’s. In essence what we are doing is giving the highest rank to features that will yield the … Continue reading Prioritizing SaaS Features
In much the same way Michael Kunze coined the acronym LAMP, I propose the use of a new industry acronym for Agile. Scrum, Lean, Kanban & Kaizen. (SLKK, pronounced slick) I have successfully used this process which incorporates techniques from all of these areas and felt it needed a name. I also feel that it … Continue reading SLKK – A New Agile Toolset
I had a discussion with a colleague yesterday on how to determine the priority of features on a given service. We quickly arrived at the topic of assessing business need, i.e. value, of the features. This is a conversation I've had many times, with many clients and thought it might be worthwhile to document some … Continue reading The Dollar Value of SaaS Features
I read Peter Senge's book The Fifth Discipline a number of years ago and loved it. I recently reread it and realized it is still as relevant today as it was then. (if not more so). While the five disciplines discussed in this book are extremely useful when managing teams, the one that always seems … Continue reading Systems Thinking, the Fifth Discipline