At a prospective client, a senior manager asked me, “In agile, when does the spec freeze?” I said it either didn’t, or did at the end of any iteration in which people wrote a spec. He had a puzzled look on his face, so I explained that if you discuss how to design or what […]
I’m a member of a panel Jul 23 for the Boston Agile Bazaar meeting, and am attempting to articulate my two-minute position statement to the question: How would you characterize your approach to handling people problems on agile teams? My problem is that I don’t do anything any differently for agile or non-agile teams. I
In the Small Steps and Plunge In posts, I said projects should transition to agile all the way. But does it work the same way for the entire organization? Nope. I recommend a gradual approach to moving to agile. Not all project teams are ready for the self-discipline agile requires. But, even more importantly, too
I love it when my readers challenge what I’m saying, as in Plunge In or Dip Your Toe? (for Projects). I do believe in small steps for projects. I’ve long been an advocate of inch-pebbles, of standup meetings, of iterations and incremental development. I love knowing what done means, for the project and for features
I’ve been teaching a variety of workshops recently, some of which are Scrum. One of the questions people have is: Can we do this partway? No, not Scrum or any other agile lifecycle. You either do it all or you’re not doing agile. You can work in timeboxed iterations. But if you haven’t gotten to
Last Tuesday, I had a blast at Boston SPIN. I led a roundtable about transitioning to agile, and discovered that not everyone takes the feedback the timebox gives them. In this case, people weren’t finishing what they “attempted to commit to” in the timebox, but they extended the timebox. I suggested that was not such
At a recent workshop, one of the participants asked me this question, “We want to start a new Scrum team. But we are confused about who to ask to be the product owner. We have a choice of someone who doesn’t know how to be a product owner, is 10 time zones away, but knows
I was exploring the idea of co-teaching with someone I met several years ago. He now teaches at a local university and no longer works in industry. He wants to teach some kind of agile workshop with me. He said, “I want to teach a thoughtful kind of agile. The kind where you work in
I spoke recently with a (new) Scrum Master with a team who’s new to Scrum. One of the team members is a little stuck. He doesn’t feel comfortable going to the task board to take a task when he’s done. He wants to wait until someone else is ready and then work with that person.
One of the big problems in organizations is how to fund projects. ROI does not work. I learned how to lie with ROI back in 1988—I can make the numbers be anything you want. But if you don’t have ROI, how do you know what projects to fund? One set of projects is the set