This afternoon I was teaching a public class on Lean-Agile principles and practices, and a question came up about the differences between Scrum and Kanban. As a fun exercise, I recreated Scrum using Kanban coupled with a set of Explicit Policies. To briefly summarize the differences, Scrum is a methodology which consists at its core…
Tag: Process
Utilization and the Myth of Shared Resources
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve had the chance to work with several organizations who equate “efficiency” with “utilization.” This morning, I tweeted that if your organization is assigning people 10% to a project, no agile method is going to help you. Renae Ramirez asked for data or evidence supporting the point that this…
Story Points Are Dead! (Long Live Story Points?)
(Alternate Subtitle: How the heck do you do estimation and forecasting in Kanban?) One of the biggest changes for many team who are adopting agile is in the way they slice, track and measure their work. They learn about “User Stories” which are sized using “Story Points”. The team adds up the number of Story…
Breaking Down Features to User Stories
In my recent post on root cause analysis and the 5-Why’s Lisa Crispin wondered if they could be used in breaking down user stories, too: Are the 5 whys only for root cause analysis? Can they be used to find out the purpose of a new user story or theme? There are many ways to…
Root Cause and “5 Why’s”
This week, we’re working with a team in Atlanta, and we did an exercise today where the students went through problems they were having, and then the issues which underlie those problems. One of the interesting things was how often the underlying "issues" weren’t issues at all because they weren’t going deep enough. As an…
Slides and Video for Delivering What’s Right at Øredev 2010
I had an absolute blast this morning presenting my Delivering What’s Right talk here at Øredev 2010. While I know the conference will be putting a better quality video online, I wanted to go ahead and put up the video I shot from my Flip camera and the slides from the talk. Thanks to Michael…
The Keys to the Kingdom
Oh the joys of not being in the grind. From this position I get to see all sorts of stuff about doing “Agile†right. Primarily from a Project Management perspective. But, I’ve got a secret. It’s one of them there plain-sight secrets that turns out to be how successful teams get things done. To us…
Technically Distributed: Tools and Techniques for Distributed Teams
This afternoon at Agile 2010 I ran a session called Technically Distributed: Tips and Techniques for Distributed Teams (slides are at the end of this post). While I gave information about some of the tools I’ve used for teams, I think the key revelations came from two exercises we did. In the first, the teams…
Slides and Video from Product Planning and Prioritization with Innovation Games
At XP2010 I gave a workshop on using Innovation Games to do product planning and prioritization. While I was able to post the pictures pretty quickly, I had to process the video and the slides. Below is the video and slides that were presented during the first part of the workshop. The second part was…
Post Agile Companies
Post Agile. I first heard the term several weeks ago in Chicago. It was used to define companies who had started up from 2005 onward. Companies who had been versed in the Agile Manifesto, who understood Lean Principles, to whom agile was second nature. These are companies doing Scrum – Daily Standups, Product Backlogs, Scrum…