FREE Agile Retrospectives Program

Agile Retrospectives is all the rage right now for good reason: never before companies and teams had so much understanding how Agile Retrospectives can help companies. However, it’s easy to get sucked into the trend of Agile Retrospectives, run a few sessions, and literally wind up with nothing to show for it. Most Scrum Masters …

5 No Estimates Decision-Making Strategies

One of the questions that I and other #NoEstimates proponents hear quite often is: How can we make decisions on what projects we should do next, without considering the estimated time it takes to deliver a set of functionality? Although this is a valid question, I know there are many alternatives to the assumptions implicit …

Lean Change Management: A Truly Agile Change Management approach

“I’ve been working in this company for a long time, we’ve tried everything. We’ve tried involving the teams, we’ve tried training senior management, but nothing sticks! We say we want to be agile, but…” Many people in organizations that try to adopt agile will have said this at some point. Not every company fails to …

The Release Paradox: releasing less often makes your teams slower and decreases quality

Herman is a typical agile coach. He works with teams to help them learn how to deliver high-quality software quickly. Many teams want to focus on design, architecture, or (sometimes) even on business value. But they are usually not in a hurry to release quickly. Recently Herman conveyed a story to me that illustrates how …

How to choose the right project? Decision making frameworks for software organizations

Frameworks to choose the best projects in organizations are a dime a dozen. We have our NPV (net present value), we have our customized Criteria Matrix, we have Strategic alignment, we have Risk/Value scoring, and the list goes on and on. In every organization there will a preference for one of these or similar methods …

Hierarchies remove scaling properties in Agile Software projects

There is a lot of interest in scaling Agile Software Development. And that is a good thing. Software projects of all sizes benefit from what we have learned over the years about Agile Software Development. Many frameworks have been developed to help us implement Agile at scale. We have: SAFe, DAD, Large-scale Scrum, etc. I …