There is a great need for coaches in Agile. Many teams find themselves “stuck” in their quest to work well together. Others have developed bad habits and can’t quite see their issue, while still others might just want an objective view of how they are doing. Asking for coaching should not be seen as a […]
Agile For Personal Improvement Experiment: Week 1
As promised, here are the two personal improvement backlog items I have chosen to work on this week: 1) As an out of shape, formerly athletic guy in his 50’s, I need to develop an exercise regimen that is realistic for my time availability and current fitness, so that I can feel better about my […]
Let’s Do An Experiment!
Applying Scrum To Our Own Personal Development. This is based on a self-improvement experiment I tried a while back but struggled with. I now know that I didn’t break my work into small enough chunks–That, and I lacked discipline. So I want to try it again, but I want to invite any readers to try […]
An Agile Perspective on Things
The term “Agile” gets beat up a lot these days by people who have come to realize that it is really just a subset of a much larger framework called “Common Sense,” and that’s fine; Agile can take it. Even some of the things I have pushed Agile to be used for would suggest that […]
Back to Back to Basics
No, that’s not a typo. This is about getting back to remembering to get back to the basics. Why do I say that? I feel like the Agile community is losing its mind. Increased focus on scaling, increased “pre-packaged models,” and an increase of Agile terminology being dumped in to the buzzword soup, has meant […]
The Orchard and the Orchardist
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 […]