Cory Foy

Nearly my entire adult life I’ve traveled in some form or another. In a band you drive on tour, and even when I was dating my wife I would drive from Florida to Virginia nearly every other weekend. So when it comes to traveling I have a very experienced sense of what it’s going to…

Ever seen an island in a lake in an island in a lake? This unusual combination exists, and you can go check it out. I included a map above for you to find it. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Did you find it? Chances are, the “map” I gave you wasn’t very useful. It showed the…

One of the hallmarks of effective teams is trust. This applies not just to the interpersonal relationships between team members, but also to the relationship the team itself has to other teams and the rest of the organization – especially management. In a low trust environment, any attempt to bring about new changes, especially from…

For many people, the word “Waterfall” causes a visceral reaction – especially in the context of projects and organizations. Unfortunately, I’m starting to come across more places where “Agile” causes the same reaction of disgust and fear. The fundamental problem is that we’ve let bad management hide behind methodology and frameworks. At their core, Waterfall,…

Along the path towards agility inevitably one comes across the terms iterative and incremental. I have seen many cases where the terms are used interchangeably, even though the mindset behind them is pretty different. To understand how, let’s introduce Roberta and the Church Analogy. Roberta (in our analogy) is the lead pastor for a rapidly…

In my last post, I gave some examples of the difference between Implementing Agile and Transforming to Agility. But like the term “Agile”, agility is an often overloaded term that means different things to different people. When I talk about agility to clients, the conversation focuses on the agility of the business, which is different…

Implementing Agile practices is easy: (Manager to team): “You have new roles! You’re the ScrumMaster, you’re the Product Owner, and the rest of you are the team.” (Manager in meetings): “And we’ll have these new meetings! You all will get together once a day to talk about your progress, and every two weeks you’ll show…

“This is awesome!” Jenny, the Product Manager exclaims to the team. “We’ve been having some challenges retaining customers, and I think we’ve got just the right idea of how to fix it! It’ll require a little retooling of our sign-up flow, but I think the impact will be incredible.” Great ideas are some of the…

When teams get introduced to various agile methods, one of the seemingly easy aspects is the notion of the product backlog. They then ask their business parts to prioritize the work in the backlog so the team(s) can pull the highest priority item. It sounds easy because people think that priorities are binary. In reality,…