In an attempt to offer some simple guidelines — This was originally written as a metaphor about being a good team-mate and steward of Agile practices, but it applies to pretty much every group in which a person might find him or herself a member—a family, a town, a company, a fellowship, heck, even a […]
Look At This Idiot …
Holiday Traffic and Product Delivery Ahhh, It’s the time of year again when I am reminded of the great metaphor of product delivery–the awe inspiring human interaction that is interstate highway holiday traffic. Hundreds of cars traveling at 75+ MPH with little more than a car length, nose to bumper and literally 2 or 3 […]
Emotions DO Matter!
Don’t you DARE tell me my emotions don’t matter OK, I won’t. What if I tell you that your emotions matter but only as long as we talk about them out in the open, honestly and transparently? I’ve had some very interesting conversations with Product Owners over the years, and I’ve been guilty of flat […]
Don’t Crash the Ambulance
We agilists want to help rescue everything Why? because we feel that Agile is THAT good. I know that when I get caught up in waxing poetic about how efficient teams can become when they adopt agile, I develop blinders and earnestly believe that agile can rescue even waterfall projects that have gone horribly wrong. […]
Kan Ban On The Floor, Kan Ban On The Wall
Below is the core of my presentation for the Southern Fried Agile conference on Oct 23rd. #southernfriedagile. Here’s the slide deck It’s funny the way you learn about something in one part of your life that you think you may never use again only to re-discover it later as one of the most important things […]
Red Hat Agile Day
Typically, this blog is devoted to questions about Agile or problems that teams encounter and how they resolve them. I’m making an exception because a pretty cool thing just occurred and I want to share it. We just hosted our first annual Red Hat Agile Day yesterday, and the turn out was fantastic. We had […]
The Heart of Agile: the individual people
Agilists Are People Too The other day, I found myself in an argument about the best way to do scrum Agile. We both had strong views, and neither of us wanted to concede the other’s points. Yes, it was an actual argument. I believe it went something like this: “Well fine.” “Fine.” “See if I […]
Guest Post: Raymond, A New Scrum Master
I’ve invited a fellow Agilist in as a guest blogger, something I think I’m going to be doing more of. Raymond is a newly minted CSM, and he’s a voracious reader of Agile books. He’s off on the right foot–using his CSM as the foundation for Agile and always looking for ways to expand his […]
The Nature of Scarcity
The Nature of Scarcity I heard this great little anecdote on NPR about a Economics book entitled Scarcity, by Eldar Shafir, and all kinds thoughts about Agile came rushing in. That comes as no surprise though. Economics is, at its core, about supply and demand, and Agile software development is about the supply of working […]
It’ll Only Take a Couple of Minutes, I swear”
or, Why Context Switching Needs To Be Taken More Seriously Any time I sense that someone is interrupting one of my team members to ask them something unrelated to their current sprint work, I feel the hair on my neck bristle. I’m their scrummaster, and my job is to protect them. Beyond that fact that […]