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Slavery
Jack Milunsky has a brief post up over at AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com wherein he discusses the issue of switching stories mid sprint. One of his points that I’d like to draw attention to is his...
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Why We Dropped Ideal Hours
Since converting to Scrum, my team has been in the practice of planning our capacity for a sprint in terms of ideal hours. We had a fairly simple spreadsheet where we’d enter the number of vacation...
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Paying Down Our Technical Debt
One of the biggest problems (if not the biggest problem) we have on our team is technical debt that has accumulated over the last 4-5 years. Fortunately, the team and our Product Owners understand the...
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Scrum & Employee Performance Plans
Our company has been in the habit of doing periodic EPPs (Employee Performance Plans). We’ve evolved from doing them once a quarter to once every four months to twice a year. We’ve gradually...
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IT Experimenting with Kanban
On Monday of last week, our network and desktop support team (what we call our “IT Team” as distinct from our software development teams) began experimenting with Kanban as our project management...
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Tweaking our Backlog Review Meeting
A number of recent problems has caused our team to tweak our weekly Backlog Review meeting. Specifically, we’ve added two items to the agenda: 1) a review of the stories tentatively scheduled for the...
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Changing Our Retrospectives
I’ve been thinking a lot about retrospectives lately both because our team has been struggling with them being ineffective/wasteful and because retrospectives were the subject of conversation at the...
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Conditions for Allocation Based Project/Portfolio Management
Imagine you have a single organization (choose your own scale: a single team or a group of teams arranged into a single, bigger organization). Now imagine that you have multiple – perhaps many –...
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Contained Failure
I assume that almost everyone has by now heard the maxim “fail early, fail often” at least once. I hope everyone has also heard the explanation that the point is not to fail early and often per se but...
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