When I was in high school, my friend Scott and I took his father’s sailboat out on the lake where our families spent summer vacation. We had each been sailing numerous times; always as crew, never at the helm. We both knew the lingo; “Come about” and “Pull that jib in tighter!”. I had taken a boat safety course, so I knew all about life jackets and right-of-way. There was even a page in the safety manual that talked about sailboats and gave a handy chart for the points of sail. We were set for adventure! Continue reading “Sailing Metaphor for Agile”
Category: Culture
Agile is more than the state of mind of the players. It’s about the environment in which they operate, too. How the players interact with their environment, how they interact with each other, and how those others interact back forms the Culture.
Navigating the Golden Circle
“Every single person on the planet knows what they do. Some know how they do it. Very, very few people know why they do what they do.” – Simon Sinek
Weaponized Scrum (Part 4)
The following is an Experience Report I presented at Agile 2009 in Chicago (Part 4 of 4) Continue reading “Weaponized Scrum (Part 4)”
Weaponized Scrum (Part 3)
The following is an Experience Report I presented at Agile 2009 in Chicago (Part 3 of 4) Continue reading “Weaponized Scrum (Part 3)”
Weaponized Scrum (Part 2)
The following is an Experience Report I presented at Agile 2009 in Chicago (Part 2 of 4)
Weaponized Scrum (Part 1)
The following is an Experience Report I presented at Agile 2009 in Chicago (Part 1 of 4).
Abstract
Scrum provides a framework for managing agile development projects. It encourages transparency at all times, which helps reinforce the cycle of trust that must exist between development teams, management and the customer.
Over the course of two years, our team had used Scrum to successfully deliver three revisions of our product with a degree of predictability that had been unattainable prior to adopting the agile method.
When the projected schedule of our next project didn’t align with the business needs of the organization, we found ourselves on the fast-track to conflict. And we had given them all the ammunition they needed to turn our gesture of trust into a weapon of unimaginable destruction.
The Culture of Agile Adoption
As a self-proclaimed Agile Evangelist (Agilist), I am keenly interested in the process of taking an organization from a traditional project management base, into a truly agile model. There are a variety of factors that come into play that make the transition from traditional to agile more of a challenge than it first appears. Continue reading “The Culture of Agile Adoption”