Organizations that are scaling up with scrum often find that Everyone Is Busy But Delivery Is Slow. This syndrome is usually caused by a lack of visibility into what people are working on, poor prioritization, and too much work in progress. The more work in progress we have, the more overhead we incur. We have meetings about the work. We create and read dashboards, reports, emails, and chat messages about about the work. People are doing all this work in order to achieve goals. Where are the goals coming from? Which ones are most important? Getting control of work in progress requires effective management of the goals.
Read the full article…
Author Archives: Chris Sims
Everyone Is Busy But Delivery Is Slow
Everyone is super busy, yet things take forever to get done. I encounter this at organizations that are scaling up with scrum. All too often, leaders want to jump to a solution, such as implementing a scaling framework. Sadly, implementing a ‘fix’ without a deep understanding of the causes of the problem will likely make things worse. Blindly implementing the framework will make people even busier and things will take even longer to get done.
Exploring and understanding the root causes of the problem is a better starting point. Read the full article…
How Do I Get A Scrum Master Job?
So where do you start?
Eliminating The 7 Wastes of Software Development With Kim Poremski
Inspired by the Toyota Production System, Mary and Tom Poppendieck describe the seven wastes of software development as: partially done work, extra features, relearning, handoffs, delays, task switching, and defects. In this video from the February Scrum Professionals MeetUp, Kim Poremski explores the seven wastes and introduces tools and techniques to overcome the seven wastes and unlock organizational agility and scalability.
The Best Agile Conference List On The Web!
A great way to continue your agile learning journey is attending conferences. You’ll learn, build your professional network, and earn SEUs to renew your scrum certifications. To make the conference selection process easier, or harder, we’ve published the most complete list of scrum, agile, and agile adjacent conferences on the web.
Read the full article…
Lessons From My First Failed Meeting
It was a bad day at Geekaplex. A star developer’s computer had crashed hard, taking a week’s worth of new source code with it. The big boss was furious! I spoke up, “We need source control and a backup system.” The big boss looked at me and said: “Get some people together and make it happen!” I called my first-ever meeting and invited all of engineering.
Nominal Group Technique For Working Agreements
Nominal Group Technique (NGT) is a facilitation tool that helps a group quickly build a comprehensive list of ideas, issues, options or solutions, and then select the best one(s). NGT works faster than traditional brainstorming, yet generates more complete and higher quality results. NGT prevents the quieter voices from being overwhelmed and allows each participant to contribute to their full potential.
The Nominal Group Technique was developed in the 1970’s by Andre Delbecq and Andrew H. Van de Ven. The effectiveness of NGT has been validated by subsequent research.
Let’s see how NGT can be used by a scrum team to create working agreements for their scrum events and other meetings. Such agreements are often called meeting ground rules.
Read the full article…
How To Create A Definition Of Done
A scrum team’s definition of done helps them continuously add value to the product and avoid backsliding or breaking things. When a product meets the definition of done, new value is available and the stakeholders can access the value whenever they choose. One way to think about the definition of done, is as a checklist that helps us guarantee the quality of the product.
Read the full article…
The Satir Change Model – A Tool For Scrum Coaches
The Satir Change Model has been a valuable tool in my scrum coaching toolbox for nearly 15 years. Read the full article…
Scaling Up With Scrum – Scale Value, Not Headcount
Scaling scrum is all the rage. People love to debate the merits of the various scaling frameworks: LeSS, SAFe, Nexus, Scrum@Scale, Disciplined Agile, FAST Agile, Spotify’s approach, and others. The underlying assumption is that the way to scale up value production is by increasing the number of people and teams. More people and teams can get more done, right? Perhaps, but there are significant costs to scaling up headcount, and alternative ways to scale up value production.
Read the full article…