Scrum Maturity Model presentation in Sydney on Wednesday 27 January.
A quick heads-up that James Cowden is giving a presentation next Wednesday night in Sydney on the Scrum Maturity Model (SMM). This should be an interesting topic with Scrum being a leading Agile methodology, and Maturity Model bringing back memories of the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) which was fairly popular in the 1990’s.
Eliminate wastage from your stand-ups
One of the critical concepts behind Lean is to eliminate wastage. You can apply this wastage elimination to all the processes within your project, including the daily stand-up meetings.
Spice up the Monday morning stand-up
The morning stand-up meetings are a great tool for keeping the whole team informed, and for identifying and resolving issues in a timely manner. They can however become somewhat repetitive. One technique I’ve used before is that in the Monday morning stand-up to ask “What did you do yesterday?” and to literally mean yesterday (i.e. Sunday). […]
The Untapped Power of a Shared Common Language
This article has moved to a new home. An updated version can be found at The School Of Innovation. Today I’m going to share with you a simple tool that can drastically increase the clarity of communication with your customers, stakeholders and within the project team. Furthermore, you can implement this tool immediately within your […]
Product Development @ Atlassian talk tomorrow night.
Just a quick reminder that Joseph Ayoub is giving a talk on Product Development at Atlassian tomorrow night, Thursday 14/1/2016. Here’s a quick synopsis: With an ambitious mission statement to ‘unleash the potential in every team’ and ‘advance humanity though the power of software’, Atlassian isn’t afraid to do things differently. Developers, Product people and […]
How to spot a novice Project Manager
I’ve heard it said before that a good way to identify a novice Project Manager (and to a lesser extent, Scrum Master) is when you hear them say something along the lines of “if something doesn’t go to plan, then we’ll…”. A seasoned Project Manager (or Scrum Master) on the other hand, will more likely […]
Software Costs Estimation In Agile Project Management
Software Cost Estimation is one of the more difficult aspects of Agile Software Development. Software Estimation has always been challenging and Agile doesn’t necessarily make this type of predictive exercise any easier. Customers, whether they be external or internal, are used to working in fixed price contracts. Getting customers to agree to fixing Time and Cost, but […]
How to “slice the elephant” – real-life Agile Scaling.
Henrik Kniberg, author of the “Scrum and XP from the Trenches”, gave the opening keynote at the Agile Tour Bangkok conference on Saturday 21 November in Thailand. His talk was titled “Real-life Agile Scaling” and includes some great insights into scaling Scrum. Especially interesting is his take on Minimum Viable Product (MVP) which he believes […]
Has Agile Outlived Its Usefulness?
If Agile is indeed an umbrella term, then the umbrella continues to increase in size. While Scrum, XP and DSDM have been under cover for quite some time, many more additions have recently taken their place in the shade including Kanban, Lean, LeSS, SAFE. Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) are hot […]
Feature teams
A feature team is “is a long-lived, cross-functional, cross-component team that completes many end-to-end customer features—one by one.” Traditional development teams are often organised as component teams, where the team will work on a component which then needs to integrated with one (often many) components developed by other teams. Feature Teams on the other hand […]