I spend a fair amount of time these days working with senior business leaders on some of the challenges they face. One of the things that both they and I are seeing is the impact of shorter business cycles on planning. While the use of the word “cycle” implies that these changes occur with some … Continue reading Agile and the Boom/Bust Cycle
Category: Uncategorized
There is a misunderstanding of Scrum and other processes and frameworks that anyone that follows the “rules” will be successful. Simply write some code in a two week Sprint and show it at the Sprint Review and magically all problems disappear. The people that believe this are missing a few key points. 1) Creation of … Continue reading Scrum, Skill and Dead Bodies
I talk quite a bit about the concept of intrinsic motivation in my presentations and workshops. Intrinsic motivation describes our satisfaction in doing something simply for the sake of doing it. Think of playing an instrument, solving a puzzle or painting a picture. The activity is a reward in itself. Daniel Pink’s “Drive” is great … Continue reading Intrinsic Motivation – Drive
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.
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