Posts by Dan Rawsthorne
3 Voting Methods for Agile Teams: Facilitating Decision-Making
3 Voting Methods for Agile Teams: Facilitating Decision-Making Things are always changing in and around an agile Team, so lots of decisions have to be made. Because agile leaders believe in collaboration and self-organization, they don’t usually make the decisions by themselves. Therefore, they need quick ways to have team members vote in some way…
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Your Ticket Out Of Crazy Town:
How Scrum’s ‘Guardrails’ Protect Teams From Chaos
As we stated before, Scrum is for developing in Complicated/Complex environments. This ties nicely to the Cynefin (ku-NEV-in) framework, which breaks Decision-Space into four areas: Clear, Complicated, Complex, and Chaotic. The detailed definitions aren’t important to us right now; the only thing we need to know is that Chaos is very bad. Chaos makes things…
Read MoreHow To Do Large Scale Scrum [Infographic]
Many large organizations find it hard to deliver valuable Results to their Stakeholders. Their size makes it difficult to adapt to the fact that both the realities of delivery and the Stakeholder’s minds change in unexpected ways. That’s when systematic scaling of Scrum becomes critical to an organization’s success.
Read MoreWhat Do You Do When You Finish a Sprint Early?
So, let me talk about the easy stuff first. One of the best things that can happen to a Scrum Team is that it finishes its work early in a Sprint. It amazes me that Teams are confused about what to do, but they are. So here goes… If the Team finishes early, it seems to me there are two choices:
Read More4 Valid Reasons (And 1 Big Invalid Reason) the Product Owner Might Cancel a Sprint
The Product Owner may quit or cancel a Sprint at any time. This is no big deal, and there are lots of valid reasons the Product Owner may want to do it. There is also one BIG invalid reason to do so.
Read More3 Goal-Driven Team Prioritization Strategies That Drive Results
The 3 layers of prioritization are the same regardless of what the Scrum Team is developing. However, overall prioritization strategies differ based on the main goals of the Team. There are 3 goal-driven Team prioritization strategies:
Read MoreThree Layers of Prioritization [Infographic]
Prioritization is arguably the most important thing in Scrum, as Scrum is about incremental delivery in order to provide value and feedback. In a nutshell, prioritization determines the order in which the value is produced, and thus drives what feedback is sought.
Read MoreManaging Known Unknowns: The PlaceHolder Story
Scrum, by its Agile definition alone, evolves. Scrum adapts and changes with the demands of its workplace environment. That’s how we’ve evolved to Scrum 3.0, the most Agile, scale-ready process framework yet…
Read MoreHow The Release Sprint Gets The Product Out The Door
Imagine you are the Team’s Product Owner at the Product Review, and the Sales Manager says, ‘That looks good! I can sell the heck out of that. Give it to me NOW! Ship that puppy!’ Now what? Are you going to say: ‘I’m sorry, we’re not planning to deliver this System for ten more weeks.’ Of course not! You’re in the value-delivering business. You’ve got to figure out what you need to do to get the system shipped.
Read MoreWhy The Startup Sprint Delivers Immediate Business Value
Agile development is all about delivering valuable Results early and often, in order to receive and incorporate feedback as soon as possible. Many of the Organizations we coach are convinced that it will take months before they can write any code that produces business value. Is this a reasonable fear? How do we get past this fear?
Read MoreSo What Is Technical Debt in Scrum, Anyways?
Technical Debt is what makes code hard to work with. It is an invisible killer of software and must be aggressively managed. In this post, I define Technical Debt and describe some of the issues…
Read More9 Surefire Steps to Spring Clean Your Backlog
The closest thing we have to spring cleaning in Scrum, is Backlog Refinement. Scrum Backlog Refinement includes moving Stories into the Back Burner and further refining them until they are Ready to go to Planning. In order to do this there are some basic things that must be done…
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