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Making Agile Teams work in real life – The quest for Stable Feature Teams?

By |2014-08-07T16:28:05-04:00August 7, 2014|Blog, Change Management, Management, Scrum, Teams|

Context This post is inspired by ongoing discussions in the AgileSparks team based on our experience trying to help organizations make agile teams work in real life. It is heavily inspired or can even be called a revision of a post from a couple of years ago on the Lean/Kanban approach to teams. If you look at the Agile Manifesto, you can find "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams" Scrum, the most popular framework for implementing agile [...]

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Do Craig Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior really mean we always need to start with a structural change? What do they say about starting with Kanban?

By |2014-06-14T08:14:23-04:00June 14, 2014|Blog, Change Management, kanban, Scrum|

I've been following Craig Larman's work for a while now. I find the books he wrote with Bas Vodde on scaling agile to be very insightful and actionable. I recently discovered Craig's "Laws of Organizational Behavior": 1. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and “specialist” positions & power structures. 2. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be reduced to redefining or overloading the new terminology to mean basically the [...]

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Kanban FAQ: Should I FINISH what I’m working on or help the team READY new work items?

By |2014-03-16T17:03:29-04:00March 16, 2014|kanban, Scrum, ScrumBan|

Once people start to get "Stop Starting Start Finishing" thinking (Kanban) or the "Focus on the current sprint" thinking (Scrum) a frequent question that comes up is how to deal with people who are required for different activities throughout the work life cycle. Some example scenarios: “I’m a tester who both participates in ATDD spec. workshop (upstream) and exploratory testing (downstream). The developers are free to start a new story, should I help them with the ATDD thinking for a [...]

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Implementing the Kanban Method using Scrum (a.k.a Scrum with a Kanban spirit)

By |2012-09-23T06:07:19-04:00September 23, 2012|Blog, kanban, Scrum, ScrumBan|

Warning: If my last postrattled your cage, let's see how you like this one... This post is a thought experiment. This hasn't been tried in the field, and might be the worst idea in the world. But at a minimum it might be a way to understand better Scrum and Kanban. Let me know what you think. The Context Let's assume a client or stakeholder in the organization wants to go agile and Scrum has been dictated to us - [...]

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Making promises you can keep WITHOUT Scrum Sprint Commitment using Classes of Service

By |2012-07-02T18:12:53-04:00July 2, 2012|Scrum, ScrumBan|

How can we make promises we can keep without a commitment to the sprint content? So I convinced you that the Scrum Sprint Commitment is not such a great idea. I convinced you it is mainly there for learning. You want to move to a commitment to try to meet the forecast instead of committing to deliver the whole forecast. But your Product Owner has a real problem with this. He understands all this learning rationale but his stakeholders want [...]

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The Scrum Sprint Commitment/Forecast as an Expectation

By |2012-06-30T17:56:57-04:00June 30, 2012|Change Management, kanban, Management, Scrum|

Disclaimer -  I'm a well-known Scrum Sprint Commitment basher. But in the last few weeks especially while processing the Lean Conference Boston Keynote by Steven Spear I have a fresh perspective I wanted to share. There is no improvement without learning One of Spear's key points was that there is no improvement without learning. There is no learning without surprises. There are no surprises without setting expectations. Specifically challenging expectations that will be missed occasionally. See a quote from one of [...]

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Experiences for a Kanban trainer in a Scrum Gathering

By |2012-05-10T13:45:27-04:00May 10, 2012|Events, Scrum|

Stranger in a strange land This week I attended and spoke at Scrum Gathering Atlanta It was a mixed experience for me. On the one hand it was interesting to see the focus of the Scrum crowd on the other hand it was a bit hard for me to find content to connect to and it was a bit of a stranger in a strange land, mainly because I'm all the way from Israel and the conference was a very [...]

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Do we need Scrum to get to Kanban???

By |2012-05-08T11:16:09-04:00May 8, 2012|kanban, Scrum, ScrumBan|

I just wrote a lengthy reply on a kanbandev thread about Using Scrum to implement Kanban and vice versa and thought I would share it here, especially so I can tweet it directly and try to spark a discussion about it in Scrum Gathering Atlanta (where I'm currently at...) I engaged the conversation when Danko said: Scrumban.... Well, another mystery regarding the above is whether scrum is an evolution of kanban (which means you evolve to a point that you can [...]

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Guest Post – Is starting with Kanban really easier than with Scrum?

By |2012-05-08T03:57:07-04:00May 8, 2012|Change Management, Export, Guest Posts, kanban, Scrum|

Today I'm proud to host a guest post by another AgileSparks coach - Yael Rabinovitz. Yael has been working with several clients on Scrum implementations and has recently started using the Kanban Method (I wonder who gave her that crazy idea…) and is sharing her thoughts about the first steps into both approaches. Without further ado, here's Yael:   Is starting with Kanban really easier than with Scrum? Kanban is often described as a way to achieve evolutionary change in [...]

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So what IS Scrumban?

By |2012-04-28T08:08:41-04:00April 28, 2012|Blog, kanban, Scrum, ScrumBan|

Background 3 years ago in Agile Israel 2009 I talked about ScrumBan. The slideshare presentation has been one of most popular ones, and remarkably enough it is the second hit on google when searching for ScrumBan. Go figure... Anyhow from time to time people ask me where they can go look up what Scrumban is and I find myself not sure where to point them for a good brief description. I have a problem with my presentation - it is [...]

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