I live in the City of San Diego and we have an estimated 1.4 million people living within the city limits. Could you ever imagine someone asking the Mayor, or the City Council, "Do we really need so many fulltime fire fighters?" Yet, a variation of this topic comes up over-and-over again ...
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"Scrum has been a big disappointment; a failed experiment that hasn't delivered anywhere near the positive impact that management was hoping for." Not the most uplifting quote, but Geoff Watts (@geoffcwatts) starts his book, Scrum Mastery: From Good to Great Servant Leadership, by telling you exactly how he sees it. Geoff also ...
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Agile Coaches (CSP-SM) are really busy people! There is no way one person can do all these activities on this list each week nor would it make sense to do so, but an effective Agile Coach would be working on most these jobs every six months or so. Rome was not ...
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A meeting is any conversation that results in a decision in order to get something done. Since the goal of the meeting is to arrive at a decision, the meeting participants stay in the meeting until they have arrived at the decision - not one second longer, not one second less. ...
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Why Tools Drive Daily Scrums into the Mud I have observed a disturbing pattern in many Daily Scrums driven by an intense focus away from the three questions and to various Agile tools. I see people checking out of the interaction, I don't hear all voices, I don't feel any ...
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To build a quality product we need to let go of the outdated 20th century idea that quality can be achieved through inspection alone, i.e. testing. Instead, let us focus on constructing a framework that produces quality outcomes from the beginning and the two Lean concepts highlighted in this article ...
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Want to make your Daily Scrums a total waste of people's time? Take a look at the following conversation - which represents part of conversation within a Daily Scrum of a larger Scrum Team of eight people - that occurs week after week on an important project with real deadlines: ...
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I was looking through some old notes and found this question from a LinkedIn group. "Has anyone experienced where impediments are raised, but you (as a Scrum Master) do not have the power, control or autonomy to remove these impediments? If so, what have you tried to overcome this?" This ...
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I came across this question\comment on the LinkedIn ScrumMasters group the other day asking about Burndown Charts and management analysis. "I send out Burndown Charts daily and have been questioned by upper managent as to why we see fluctuations, up or down to the ideal trend line." For those that are ...
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A recent question in the Certified Scrum Professionals LinkedIn Group, described a common scenario that people have when dealing with distributed Scrum Teams. "ScrumMaster and Scrum coach are onshore (the client) while vendor teams are offshore. Is the client fooling itself?" The short answer to this question is, "Yes - ...
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