Agile Risk Board
Risk management is crucial on any IT projects. It is a core activity of project management discipline, already well documented in Prince 2, PMBOK or CMMI (thus it is an essential p
RIP MBO
I’ve worked with MBOs a.k.a. Management By Objectives on and off at a variety of places. Your manager (and presumably their manager) define a set of quantifiable (S.M.A.R.T.) obj
How to (Really) Improve Process Efficiency
The definition of process efficiency is essentially “the amount of effort or input required to produce your business’s product.” For instance, if it takes 300 workers to make
Treating “Impedimentia”
Why is it so hard to come up with impediments sometimes? I know that impediments are all around me – literally everywhere I look. So why is it that when we do the daily standup a
Story Completion – A Pain in the ‘neck’!
The word ‘neck’ can be replaced with an appropriate one! In our last sprint we were not able to complete nearly 60% of the stories in our sprint. On the last day before
What is a “Cross-Functional” team?
Cross functional teams are groups consisting of people from different functional areas of the company – for example, marketing, product, sales, and customer success. These ca
Fragile Manifesto
A humorous response to the Agile Manifesto, written by Scott Ambler and submitted to the August edition of Software Development Magazine. Sadly in many cases it
Spring spillover? Try “Swarming”
We all know that scrum teams are made up of individuals with cross functional skills that commit to completing the sprint backlog as a team. Instead of a traditional Project M
The art of failing gracefully
One of my favorite quotes comes from the great entrepreneur Henry Ford Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently. The story of one my failures
YAGNI: You ain’t gonna need it
Yagni originally is an acronym that stands for “You Aren’t Gonna Need It”. It emerged as one of the key principles of Extreme Programming. Put another way,