Posted by Daniel Burm around lunchtime: January 13th, 2012
Scaling the productowner (PO) role is tricky business. When you scale up too much within the same context, things become cumbersome. We don’t want to bring back the same centralized fear ridden ineffective decision making climate, we tried to kill off in the first place. When people spend so much time and effort to bring back entrepreneurship, they don’t want to create layer over layer of hierarchical PO/CPO relationships.
So if there is this perceived risk of fallback involved, why do we actually want to scale the PO role at all?
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Posted by Daniel Burm in the late evening: December 8th, 2011
A walking skeleton as meant in scrum is not always feasible. That’s the first sentence of one of my previous blogs. This one starts the same but approaches the subject from a different angle. The angle here is that we teach people to make story maps based on personas; the user, administrator and so on, but we don’t actually take into account that the product has to be bought by someone and how that decision actually works. This blog post tries to tie complex buying decisions into story mapping, to find the shortest route to a sellable Frankenstein, rather than a mere bag ‘o bones.
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Posted by Jarl Meijer in the early evening: November 24th, 2011
Imagine you are playing a game of rugby against some blacksuited guys who are doing some odd dancing and screaming exercise before you finally get to start playing. You win the game 27 – 3. You can imagine it wasn’t just one beer at the big party after the match and you did not see home before early morning. A year later your team finds itself in the same stadium against the same guys, doing the same little piece of folk dancing, just a little louder than last year. This time you win 27 – 6, only. The coach and the crowd are going mad: your team lost half of its performance in just a year time! You take a shower, no beers, go home and go to bed early. Measuring the improvement in performance is easy! How about Scrum teams? ….
Posted by Daniel Burm around lunchtime: November 1st, 2011
A walking skeleton as meant in story-mapping, being the minimal marketable/ shippable feature set, is not always feasible. When working from existing system environments I am quite inclined to argue that in these situations it is often the best route to base your first product slice on risk rather than end-user value, but only if the support is there to enable you.
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Posted by Daniel Burm in the early morning: September 16th, 2011
Agile companies that want to create real ownership, have to say goodbye to traditional stakeholdership and embrace “joint company stakeholdership”. Remain to be an old-skool stakeholder in an agile environment and you will possibly act as a “stakekeeper” instead of a “stakesharer”, therefore withholding the company “staketakers” from focus on value and real ownership of results.
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Posted by Martien van Steenbergen mid-morning: August 29th, 2011
What electronics tools exist to electronically master the agile process like Scrum, Kanban, and others?
Since this question surfaces every now and then, answers collect here (in alphabetical order).
- Agile Bench
- Google Docs
- Microsoft » Excel
- FlowKaizen
- Atlassian » Greenhopper for JIRA
- Hansoft
- Bandit Software » LeanKit Kanban
- Pivot Labs » Pivotal Tracker
- Rally Software » Rally
- ScrumDesk
- Silver Stripe » Silver Catalyst
- smartQ
- TargetProcess
- Version One Suite
- Atlassian » Vodafone wins Ultimate Scrum Board Award
Got more?
Contributors:
- Serge Beaumont
- Erica
- Theo Gerrits
- Olav Maassen
- Pieter Rijken
- Yves Hanoulle
- Jem
Posted by Daniel Burm mid-afternoon: August 26th, 2011
Some time ago I saw an interview on a talk show that intrigued me. It kept me thinking and even to this date the topic discussed still puzzles me. In modern day organizations and markets more and more emphasis is placed on efficient behavior which should lead to better results and better ROI. Effective behavior is also sometimes mentioned, but way less often and it’s is not elaborated upon as much as efficiency. Maybe it’s because both nouns have two f’s and a lot of e’s, so people tend to forget about effectiveness?
Posted by Niklas Odding in the early morning: May 3rd, 2011
This Blog is a kick off to for many writings about architecture in an Agile World. We will explore the topic from all the views possible, in order to gain a better understanding about it. By doing so, we hope to create a community of followers, who would also like to contribute or discuss about this topic.
Xebia is helping many organizations in the Netherlands, France, the United States and India with implementing an agile way of system development. In most of the cases the Scrum method is applied and very good results are achieved. Business and IT are working much closer together, resulting in more quality and much more customer satisfaction. However, lately we also see a trend in problems that seem to occur in (almost) every organization. Software is developed in a fast way with high quality, but it takes forever to get it in production. The more teams are being formed, the more interdependencies between the teams occur (more…)
Posted by Martien van Steenbergen around lunchtime: April 2nd, 2011
Scrum has much ado about Definition of Ready and Definition of Done.
The Definition of Ready for the current phase equals the Definition of Done for the previous. Likewise, the Definition of Done for the current phase equals the Definition of Ready for the next. They are the two sides of the same membrane.
So, why not simplify it and talk about the membrane only?