Month: March 2019

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The Dark Side of the Scrum Guide

Sjoerd Nijland has written a great blogpost about his journey to PSMIII and the nuances in words from the Scrum Guide. Such as:

  • Framework, Methodology, Process, Techniques
  • Event, Meeting
  • Development
  • Done, “Done”, Ready, Shippable, Releasable
  • Self-organising
  • Facilitate, Serve
  • Visible, Open, Transparent, Accessible
  • Titles vs Roles and Multi-disciplinary vs Cross-functional.
  • When is a Sprint Backlog created? And is it considered output of a Sprint Backlog?
  • When does the Sprint Planning take place?

Read the complete post here: https://medium.com/serious-scrum/the-dark-side-of-the-scrum-guide-835b298f8140

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Three reasons to stop talking about time and deadlines in Agile environments

Timelines and deadlines have always been tricky for software development. With the advent of Agile software development and Scrum, the may feel even trickier. In this post, Ziryan Salayi explores how you can move the conversation from time and deadlines to something that matters: delivering value to your customers faster.

Read the complete article here: https://medium.com/the-liberators/timelines-and-deadlines-how-to-handle-them-in-an-agile-environment-79f5946072ee

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Ask A Professional Scrum Trainer – Martijn van Asseldonk – Answering Your Most Pressing Scrum Questions

In this episode of Ask a Professional Scrum Trainer, PST Martijn van Asseldonk answered the pressing Scrum questions from the audience. Some of these questions included.

  • How does Scrum work with virtual teams?
  • How did you become an agile coach?
  • How do you help leadership adopt the agile mindset?
  • How do you measure teams?
  • What’s the best way to do estimation?
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Asking the right questions; how to help a Scrum Team switch from a technical to a functional Backlog

One of the biggest challenges for a Scrum Team is to switch from a technical to a functional perspective on their work. Christiaan Verwijs has developed a set of helpful questions that often trigger teams into a functional frame of mind.

  • Why is it important that we implement this?
  • What problem of stakeholders and/or end-users do we solve by doing this?
  • What personas benefit from this, and why? (given that you have personas)
  • How would sales explain the benefits of this to customers and/or users
  • What reasons would an end-user have to want this?
  • How would you explain this to a colleague who is not part of this project?
  • How would you explain this to your spouse, at home, after a hard of work?
  • What would you show during the review to demonstrate that this is working?
  • If you are a user, how would you test if this works?
  • What changes would a user notice after implementing this?
  • What stakeholders benefit from this, and why?
  • If we wouldn’t do this, what would end-users and or customers miss or be unable to do?
  • What compliment would a happy user of customer give after delivering this?
  • How would you explain this to a potential end-user?
  • What steps would you go through in the application to test if this works?
  • If we’d put this in release notes that will be read by end-users, how would we announce it?

Read the original article here: https://medium.com/the-liberators/asking-the-right-questions-how-to-help-a-scrum-team-switch-from-a-technical-to-a-functional-bee6c1598487

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Liberating Strategy

Liberating Strategy begins and ends with Liberating Structures (LS). They are simple rules that make it possible to include and engage every voice in shaping the future and strategy. LS can be used to not only create a different kind of strategy but also to transform the whole process of strategy-making.

Read the complete article by Keith McCandless and Johannes Schartau here: https://medium.com/@keithmccandless/liberating-strategy-6fda41f6c1

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The Essence of Lean

The core idea of lean manufacturing is actually quite simple…relentlessly work on eliminating waste from the manufacturing process.

So, what is waste? It can take many forms, but the basic idea is to eliminate anything and everything that does not add value from the perspective of your customer.

Another way to look at lean manufacturing is as a collection of tips, tools, and techniques (i.e. best practices) that have been proven effective for driving waste out of the manufacturing process.

Seven Deadly Wastes

  • Overproduction
  • Waiting
  • Transport
  • Motion
  • Overprocessing
  • Inventory
  • Defects
  • Unused human potential*

Read the complete article here: https://www.leanproduction.com/intro-to-lean.html