Driving Continuous Improvement
Find a vast array of advanced scrum topics and patterns that can increase your Team’s Velocity. Online courses and classes for Scrum Masters, Scrum Product Owners, and those team members seeking continuous improvement. If you’re not a member, visit our pricing and plans page for more detail.
Patterns: Finish Early, Accelerate Faster
Finish Early, Accelerate Faster (FEAF) is a Scrum pattern language composed of a number of Scrum Patterns used together. FEAF is an incredibly powerful pattern language because it will help new Teams establish good practices and take experienced Teams Hyper-Productive; defined as a Velocity 400% higher than a Teams’ initial Velocity.
Scrum Retrospectives
One of the core principles in Scrum is the idea of continuous improvement. Each Sprint the Team engages in an inspect-and-adapt cycle during the Retrospective meeting. Beyond that though, the Scrum Guide doesn’t offer much insight into how to run a successful Retrospective and how to use the meeting to improve production, quality, and velocity.
All Continuous Improvement Topics
Systematic CMMI 5 Fixed Price Contracts After 7 Years of Scrum
In 2006, I trained the first 30 Scrum Masters at Systematic in Aarhus, Denmark. As a CMMI Level 5 organization, they wanted to go lean by testing Scrum as a process improvement. Within six months Scrum cut project costs in half and reduced defects by 40% plus or minus...
War and Organizational Change
In yet another odd intersection of the two worlds I've worked in, covering war and Agile transformation, I recently came across the Michael Horowitz book, The Diffusion of Military Power (via Tom Ricks’ excellent blog at Foreign Policy The Best Defense). Horowitz...
#idefineagile Winner
Agility, by its very nature, is hard to pin down. In many ways it shouldn’t be codified and corralled by a restrictive and reductive definition. Agile is about adaptation to a changing landscape, so really the best description is laid out in the values and principles...
Can You Define Agility?
Most years, just after the first of January, I fly to Hawaii and while escaping the New England winter is a bonus, my real reason is to attend the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS.) The conference is pretty broad, but one of the tracks...
Update: DoD Goes Agile
Update November 2013: SEI has posted a report analysing the legal documents that require Department of Defense to use agile practices. Defense contractors that Scrum Inc. is working with propose Scrum for most new projects. See also DoD CIO comments on agile...
Give Thanks for Scrum 2013
Every year just before Thanksgiving Agile Boston hosts Give Thanks for Scrum. It is the only time that the two co-creators of Scrum, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, speak together, and answer questions. Jeff gave the latest iteration of his talk, Scrum: The Future...
Pioneering Multitasking Researcher Has Died
One of the things we emphasize in Scrum is the toll that multi-tasking can take on productivity. Study after study shows switching from one project to another in quick succession can seriously hurt your velocity. In many companies teams are often assigned more than...
Jeff Sutherland weighs in on HealthCare.gov launch
Hear what Jeff has to say about the HealthCare.gov launch on NPR's All Things Considered. From the NPR website: "The federal government's beleaguered health care exchange site, HealthCare.gov, shares little in common with the e-commerce sites consumers use every...
When is an Engineer Worth $10M a Year?
Salesforce.com Agile Transformation - Agile 2007 Conference from Steve Greene Chris Fry just got $10M in stock options as Twitter prepares for public stock offering. He previously drove an all-at-once transformation of SalesForce.com to Scrum which helped make it the...
What the Heck is Business Value Anyways?
If you use Scrum, you probably hear the term “business value” tossed around a lot. At Scrum Inc., we get asked about it all the time. Here are some of the more common questions: “Business value seems so vague, what does it mean exactly?” “Does lowering costs have more...
6 Agile Ways To Increase Employee Engagement
Organizations who utilize Agile ways of working experience a 20-30% improvement in employee engagement. Engage, Equip & Empower your employees.
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