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Learning Science and Agile Training
New cognitive psychology results can help us provide better training. Trainers seek to transform the way you think about tasks, motivation, planning and outcomes, and equip you with enough understanding to succeed. My Scrum Trainings are done in the afternoon, reinforcing learning by exploiting sleep cycles. Further ideas include changing venues from day-to-day, varying ways…
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Meeting Scrum: Part 1, Make Information Flow
Meeting Scrum can make long meetings, trainings, and workshops more agile. When Scott Downey came to town, I used Meeting Scrum to bring Scott in as part of an in-progress 16 hour Scrum Training. It made the training more spontaneous and showed the highly adaptive nature of agile methods. Part 1 of a multi-part blog…
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Cult of Zero: Free Your Creative Soul
A “Cult of Zero” is slowly developing worldwide. Adherents drive the total emails in their inbox to zero, every day, with great results in improved productivity. I talk about how you can get your inbox to zero, and keep it there.
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Agile 2010 Impressions
Agile 2010 was held in Orlando near the Disney Epcot resort August 9 to 13. I focus on agile enterprises and attended many enterprise-focused talks. If you are interested in the developer focused view, Martin Fowler provides his thoughts here. My impressions follow. Portfolio management is being implemented in conjunction with quarterly “sprints” in other…
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Agile 2010: Enterprise Scrum
I presented our work on Enterprise Scrum at Agile 2010 this year. The session was well-attended for a specialized talk like this one (really only suitable for software engineering teams larger than 30 people), with about 40 people in the audience. Enterprise Scrum: Creating an Agile Company Enterprise Scrum, a fractal extension of Scrum and…
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Facilities Planning for Agile Software Development
I’ve helped shape the configuration of software engineering facilities lately, and reviewed literature around this area seeking to maximize productivity. You may be interested in my findings. One of the most influential papers in agile development discusses an experiment using six 8-person software teams in an automobile company [Teasley 2002]. They compared cubicle-based teams (each…
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Poverty Thinking and Corporate Transformation
Summary: Success arises when we transform significantly, not just do marginally better. We must give ourselves and our teams mandates, time and incentives to ponder and execute such transformations. Last month, MIT professor and economist Esther Duflo won the prestigious John Bates Clark award, for the person under 40 who contributed most to economics. There…
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2010 Resolutions: Q1 Retrospective
Perform a quarterly personal retrospective on your 2010 resolutions to accelerate achievement, using techniques from agile, lean and GTD methods.
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The Demise of NUMMI
A colleague of mine, Kris Niles, sent me this long (59 minute), but compelling audio from “This American Life”, on the demise of the Fremont NUMMI auto plant. The GM Fremont plant was shutdown in 1982, restarted as GM/Toyota NUMMI in 1984, adopted the agile “Toyota Production System” through a massive education program (they flew…
