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Failure Rates
“If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”—Thomas J. Watson, IBM
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Pair-Author Backlog Items for Faster, Better Results
Product Backlog Item (PBI) writing in Scrum is best done by pairing a Product Owner with an architect or team member. The Product Owner brings a stakeholder perspective to the table, and PBIs should include that “value perspective” in every case. When the PO is not “primary”, you get PBIs that have no demonstrable stakeholder…
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How We Charge Our Clients
Senex Rex charges by the day, not the hour. This allows us to focus, to think, to innovate. Tracking time obsessively, as many lawyers and consultants do, turns them into automatons who can follow the rules, color inside the lines, who might take a dysfunctional situation and make it average. We’re reasonable, of course. If…
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Agile Resolutions
January is “New Years Resolution Month” for me. I plan what I’ll improve in the rest of the year and how I’ll do it. Roughly 88% of people who make New Years Resolutions fail [Lehrer 2009]. Twenty years ago, software projects had extremely high failure rates like this. The software industry started adopting “agile” management…
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Converting from Waterfall to Scrum – The First 30 Days
In a 30-day period, Senex Rex motivated and shepherded a 700-person company, with development teams in 4 countries, to convert from waterfall to Scrum, with two training courses, one in the USA and the other in India. Today Dan Greening watched the CTO answer employee questions perfectly in front of 68 Indian, Ukrainian and British…
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Velocity Variance: Should we seek consistent velocity?
Rhythmic experimentation defines Scrum. A good Sprint experiment seeks to improve important metrics, such as increasing velocity or decreasing bug count. Some managers claim consistent velocity is important. Percent velocity deviation, σ(V)/E(V), is a reasonable metric to compare teams’ consistency. However, software companies usually look for innovation and profitability. Staid, old companies recreating boring stuff…
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Agile Capitalization Video: Greening and Rudd
Dan Greening recently got together with John Rudd, Managing Director of SolutionsIQ, to discuss Agile capitalization methods. Watch this 15-minute breakdown of Dan’s experience doing Enterprise roll-outs of Agile and in dealing with portfolio management of Agile. Here’s a link to the Agile Capitalization article Dan wrote for InfoQ. Why Should Agilists Care About Capitalization?
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Five Challenges to Large Organizations that Force Agility
Sometimes, looking at the bigger picture of workflow can highlight traditional bottlenecks. Duplicating code for the sake of expediency is one of the symptoms of eroding agility. Removing interdepartmental barriers will bring greater agility to an organization. In this first of 5 articles, Dan Greening makes a strong case for doing software modification tasks in…
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The First of Five Challenges to Large Organizations that Force Agility
Daniel R Greening, PhD. Managing Director, Senex Rex As a company grows, agility can erode over time. And so, when we’re in startups, we can generate features really fast when a customer demands something, we have a turn-around time of less than a week often, and we can deliver something of value. When a company…
