Posted by Nicole Belilos late at night: January 25th, 2012
How do you change the way you live or work? Many people, and companies, seem to think it’s enough to adopt just one or two practices. While they continue their old habits, too. Will this lead you to your desired outcome? Or will you just get frustrated?
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 afternoon: December 23rd, 2011
My motto regarding innovation is: being a first mover is a strategic choice, moving fast isn’t. Agile and scrum can help you move fast, so how can it accommodate innovation?
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 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 Nicole Belilos in the wee hours: October 1st, 2011
Let me introduce you to Nick, Martijn and Harold. Junior developers at a large company. They were good. They were young. And they were angry.
Angry, because they felt they were being held down by the system. As junior developers they only got to do simple, boring work. They were unable to show all their knowledge, or use the cool things they had learned in college. Their salary matched the level of the work they did, and this was another big frustration.
Then one day the company decided to transfer to Agile, and the lives of Nick, Martijn and Harold changed. While in the beginning it looked like a great improvement, the young men soon got trapped…
Posted by Pieter Rijken in the early morning: September 30th, 2011
I used to be a big fan of tools. I still am…..but not as big a fan as I used to be. This changed after I realized the meaning of ‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools’. Especially the “interactions over tools” part. This week’s blog Eat your failure cake! Learn from your mistakes. motivated me to share one of my failure cakes with 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 Erwin van der Koogh late at night: August 9th, 2011
Today I was asked a really interesting question by a client: “Agile is very simple, why do you need Agile coaches?”.
That is a pretty fundamental question to ask of any Agile coach and after my initial shock we did come up with some good answers.
But the question (and the initial answers) kept nagging at me all day. And while I sat down with a glass of good whisky in the evening I got back to the question. Here is what I came up with:
- Agile is simple, not easy
- Experience bootstraps learning
- Organizational gravity