Social and digital is accelerating the service economy transformation in our world. In the service economy, the competitive advantage is knowledge (including skills and expertise) and connectivity (access to resources – technology is the enabler). At the individual worker level, … Read More
What is agile? Why agile? How do we do agile? What’s the difference between Agile, Scrum, Lean, Design Thinking? Tell me about Scrum. Is agile a fad? What’s the difference between Agile and agility? All answered, in a 33 minute … Read More
On the recurring, practical question of what to do when there are missing skills and expertise in the cross-functional Scrum Team: Yes, it’s true that the Scrum Guide says “Cross-functional teams have all competencies needed to accomplish the work without … Read More
The Irony of Delivering Agile Transformation with Waterfall Agile and digital transformation projects are abundant today. The irony is that too frequently, they are planned and delivered in essentially waterfall project management style. Waterfall is a linear, plan-all-the-way, phased execution … Read More
Why brainstorming doesn’t work That was fun, but… Why do we get that slight, lingering feeling of doubt and dissatisfaction after brainstorming sessions? Here’s why: Group dynamics: 80/20 rule applies. Domination: The vocal minority dominate the space, crowding out the … Read More
Pilot objective Within the Scrum community, there is abundant writing suggesting that the two main factors of Scrum implementation failure are: (1) sub-optimal team structure at the onset, and (2) the Scrum Team failing to reach critical formation maturity early … Read More
Classic Scrum’s Achilles’ heel One of the weak areas of classic Scrum, in my opinion, is the relative simplicity of the ideation phase. “What to build” is sometimes an arbitrary discussion during the Scrum Backlog building and Sprint Planning exercises, … Read More
Lean: not just a hype word for efficiency Yah sure, we do “lean” here and we operate a tight ship with just a few of us doing everything – you know, everyone is multi-taskin’. “Lean” is such a convenient term, … Read More
Glossary: Lean, Agile, Scrum, Sprint, Kanban Consider Lean & Agile as pretty much the same thing, they are basically really good approaches to handling projects with a lot of uncertainties, which is why successful startups take this approach. (For a … Read More
(This post is an excerpt from our earlier article A Pretty Good Summary of Lean, Agile, Scrum.) ‣ The Spiritless Scrum: Sprints as Mini-Waterfalls Often, User Stories become mini specification documents. With that, coding or whatever activity gets executed, and … Read More