Looking Beyond My World Of Scrum

February 26, 2010

Earlier this week I attended David Anderson’s Kanban Coaching Workshop in Miami. It carried a hefty $3000 price tag. In the end, the value I gained was well beyond what I paid. Not only did I have the chance to learn from a guy who is working to change an industry, I got the chance to [...]

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Introduction to Kanban Webinar March 9th

February 25, 2010

The first 100 people that sign up for my newsletter will be invited to my next free webinar – Introduction to Kanban – being help March 9, 2010 at 2 PM EST. This is hot on the heels of my attending the Kanban Coaching Workshop with David Anderson, so attendees will be getting the most [...]

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Product Owners and Scrum Teams Can Get Along

February 24, 2010

Product Owners and Scrum teams can get along when negotiating of what goes into a sprint is removed.
One quote from David Anderson’s Kanban Coaching Workshop was,
Design systems to eliminate conflict.
One topic of discussion was the tension in Scrum between the Product Owner and the Scrum team or the ScrumMaster. We talked about whether this tension [...]

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Scrum’d Gets Serious With User Stories

February 24, 2010

Today’s update to Scrum’d brings projects closer to showing the value that users get. On a per-project basis, you can determine the formatting of user stories. There are two options:

User Story Formatting (shown above)
Free form

If you choose to use user story formatting for your project, then your user stories will be formatted with the commonly [...]

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When Will IT Be A First Class Citizen?

February 23, 2010

I’m attending the Kanban Coaching Workshop with David Anderson (@agilemanager) this week. I am definitely the most inexperienced in the room, with a mere 10 years in IT. I am humbled by the depth of knowledge and experience in the room. This class is highly recommended if you can afford it.
During dinner with Siraj Sirajuddin [...]

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Prescriptive Versus Descriptive Agile

February 22, 2010

This past weekend at BarCamp Miami, Ed Toro (@eddroid) gave a great talk on Agile principles. Something he said struck a cord with one audience member, and that was when he discussed the difference between prescriptive and descriptive Agile methods. The two he compared were Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP).
The definition of Scrum on the [...]

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Manager’s Guide to Setting Release Dates

February 18, 2010

Let me state the obvious: projects miss their release dates. We’ve all experienced it, so there’s no need to try and deny it.
But why?
Are we taking on too much work? Did our customer change too many things during the development cycle? We’re our estimates highly inaccurate due to a lack of necessary information?
Perhaps.
However, one of [...]

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Tell Me Your Agile Success Story, I’ll Help Promote Your Company

February 17, 2010

After my post on how managers need to be re-trained, I saw this sad tweet from Dawn Cannan (@dckismet).
My first reaction was, frankly, not too professional. After I got over my initial disgust with the situation, I pointed Dawn to my post. Her response was that she needs empirical data to help prove the point [...]

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It’s Time to Re-Train Management

February 16, 2010

I had a great conversation the other day with a friend of mine – Hayden Olson. He’s a fellow MBA, super smart guy, entrepreneurial type, and currently kicking much ass at his corporate job.
One of the topics he and I discussed was the dysfunction present in many companies today. Mainly it’s the attitude of management where their [...]

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Do You Understand Communication More Than Dilbert?

February 15, 2010

Proper communication between business and IT is more critical than ever.
One of the biggest problems though is that there is no common language.
In the Dilbert cartoon above, the IT department is debating how to handle the word “robust,” after being told by the marketing department to make the product robust. But what does that mean?
I [...]

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