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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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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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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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Enterprise Scrum: Scrum Gathering
On 9 March 2010, I gave a talk on Enterprise Scrum at the 2010 US Scrum Gathering in Orlando, Florida. I am grateful that about 50 people showed up for my talk, from about 300 total Scrum Gathering attendees. People were intrigued by fractal thinking, by the blunt assertion that engineering teams rapidly burn money,…
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Pushing Agility Upstream
Most agile teams live in a waterfall ecosystem. When powerful stakeholders—like business partners, customers, other departments or executives—demand future commitments, while interrupting contributors with unprioritized demands, smart Scrum teams raise a protective shield. They make the Product Owner manage stakeholder priorities, and make the ScrumMaster defend them against interference. If anyone provides a date to…
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Scrum Self-Similarity: Creating Organizational Fractals
Scrum exhibits fractal self-similarity, a property you can use to scale Scrum. Large organizations can deliver higher corporate productivity, revenues and agility in the face of rapidly changing markets. Everything scales, including the challenges. We use a unique Enterprise Scrum process at Citrix Online (we are aware of no other organization using it) to manage…
