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Enterprise Scrum Thinking: Part 1 of 3
In the first of 3 podcasts, I discuss how to spread agile approaches beyond individual teams to the enterprise level, where potential benefits and challenges multiply. In the realm of project portfolio management, decision-making roles can include a Chief Product Owner and Enterprise ScrumMaster.
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Bulk Estimation
Estimating lots of work items can help agile teams dramatically: Estimates help Product Owners make trade-offs, help teams gauge capacity, help Product Owner forecast feature releases, and help team members think about architectural issues. However, in too many cases, estimating is painfully boring and slow. It doesn’t have to be. Why Estimate?
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Agile Abandonment 2: Root Causes
Agile Abandonment Syndrome is a phenomenon where—after implementing agile practices and seeing direct evidence of their benefits—a company stops improving, its agile behaviors degrade, and ultimately loses market share or productivity. We have seen this in many companies.
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Agile Portfolio Management Helps Retain Agility?
Agile methods create conflict. So to retain agility, we must actively promote it even after agile has taken hold. How can we equip a company with the cultural and process tools to sustain agility? Your choices may depend on your perspective. Social psychologists teach organizations to reinvent themselves, but this approach may be too slow…
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Review: Liz Keogh, Learning and Perverse Incentives
Liz Keogh, Learning and Perverse Incentives: The Evil Hat, QCon London 2011 This 50 minute talk discusses perverse incentives: situations where incentivizing individual behavior causes an organization to become dysfunctional. When we attempt to optimize an organization, but fail to use systems thinking (i.e., when we are optimizing from an internal perspective) we can create…
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Is Hiring More the Right Answer?
In my last company, I used to hear people say “We need more people to handle this workload.” Every group in the company considered in isolation could use more people, no matter what group they are in; at least that’s what most people think. But smart folks sometimes say, “We have too many people.”
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Quality is Not Negotiable? A Contrarian View
In Martin Fowler’s blog post, Tradable Quality Hypothesis, he reiterates the oft-repeated agile cliché that “quality is not negotiable.” I argue that making quality inviolable lets engineers off the hook for understanding and prioritizing quality efforts.
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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…
