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Why a Prerequisite Course?

Participants in our courses are sometimes surprised to find out that they have work to do in advance of the course. Most of our live, interactive courses involve a self-guided, online prerequisite course. Here’s why. Read More

On the Value of Product Owner Training

I love teaching Product Owner classes because the PO is in such a high-leverage role. The PO's work affects the work of 7, 9, maybe even 18 other people. And it's not difficult to triple the value delivered by a Scrum team, simply by improving their PO's skills in a few key ways. Let's look at the financial impact of that change... Read More

MMFs: What they are and why they matter

Suppose you have a headache. A bad headache. "I'll take Tylenol to make it go away," you think. So, you grab the Tylenol bottle and see that the directions indicate taking two pills. Would you take 20 pills in an attempt to make your headache go away 10 times faster? Read More

Agile Homeschool Update

Last year, I wrote about how we use an agile approach for homeschool. Since then, we've refined our approach. This school year, we updated our board to reflect some of those changes. Read More

3 Ways to Handle End-of-the-Year Holidays on Your Agile Team

The period from mid-December to early-January can be disruptive for an agile team. You're used to working on a regular cadence, maybe in 2-week iterations. Suddenly, there's an avalanche of company holidays and vacation time that throws off your velocity and cadence. Here are 3 ways you can make the end of the year a useful and productive time rather than a few weeks of frustration and waste. Read More

Focusing on the Right Things in Your Daily Scrum

"Yesterday, I was in Sprint Planning..." I hear it once, and I'm suspicious. By the time the third team member says this, it's clear the Daily Scrum I'm observing is broken. Everyone in the room knows we did planning yesterday—we were all there. It's not valuable content to help the team plan its day. Too many Daily Scrums are a waste of time. It's not always this blatant, but if everyone knows what they're going to say in advance of the meeting and nothing changes as a result of the meeting, that team is probably missing the point. So, what is the point? Read More

Agile Homeschool

My wife and I have been homeschooling our 3 boys since our oldest, who turns 13 tomorrow, started kindergarten. From the beginning, we've tried to apply the Agile, Lean, and accelerated learning principles I use in my work. After 8 years of experimentation, we've settled on a system that works really well for our family. This post isn't about why we homeschool, what curricula we use, etc. Rather, I'd like to give a glimpse into how we apply some of the principles and practices I use and teach in my classes to a non-software context. Read More

Change Happens—So Make it Cheaper

Change on software projects is expensive; it leads to wasteful rework. Change is risk. We can deal with risk one of two ways. We can reduce the likelihood of the negative event occurring. Or we can reduce the impact of the negative event when it does occur. (Of course, the two can often be combined.) The traditional approach says, "Let's put more effort and thought in up-front and avoid that expensive change." (That is, let's prevent the negative event from occurring.) The problem, as decades of experience have shown, is we still can't seem to avoid change. Here's why: the kinds of change that plague software development can't be eliminated by thinking harder up front. Read More

Functional Managers in Agile

As an organization transforms to an agile way of working, functional managers (e.g. a dev manager or a test manager) can feel lost. Many of their traditional responsibilities move to other roles or disappear altogether. How can functional managers continue to add value in an agile organization? Here are a few ideas… Read More