So Agile It Hurts Sometimes

I’m excited to say that last week’s iteration went much better than the two previous. Like Dr. Arroway’s discovery, I’m finding things that I have been telling Agile teams for years are coming back to me in this little experiment. Despite Hurricane Florence killing our power for 27 hours on Saturday, I completed both of […]

Well that didn’t go as planned at all. Being out of town/out of the country is not conducive to staying focused on self improvement. What worked well is continuing to ensure my new workout regimen was feasible. It was not new work.  It was simply refining the model I had built.  Neither living in someone […]

I did a little retrospecting on last week’s effort, and came away with a few of things. I pulled away from the book writing user story to focus on a new blog post about using the wheel of Agile principles. I honestly thought it would propel me into writing the 5 pages about coaching alliances. […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]