Agile Metrics: 4 Balanced KPIs to Measure Success
Whatever your feelings on metrics, organizations will expect them for your team. Here are my four go-to metrics for an Agile team to gauge team throughput, work quality, predictability, and health.
How to Hire a Certified Scrum Trainer
Though many aspects of the Scrum framework are uniform, Certified Scrum Training is not an "off the shelf" commodity. Trainers can vary dramatically in experience and approach, so you should think carefully about how you choose — and what you want to get out of it.
Tips for Communicating About Your Agile Transformation
“Too many coaches relegate themselves to the kid’s table and are really ineffective at making big, organizational-level changes. Agile coaches are change agents and should be sitting at the adult table”. I am paraphrasing my colleague, but this was the gist of his lament when discussing effectiveness of some Agile ...
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Types of Scrum Product Owners
There are many different types of Product Owners in the world, so let us examine the common ways I have seen Product Ownership implemented in the wild from the most powerful to the least powerful. God (or Goddess) of the Product: this is the most powerful of all the Product ...
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Agile Retrospective Framework in Five Steps
Did you know that every well-run Retrospective follows five steps? In my experience, the best Retrospectives follow this outline first created by Diana Larsen and Esther Derby in their book, Agile Retrospectives. Here is a summary of each stage. 1. Set the Stage: setting the stage helps people focus ...
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User Stories: Making the Vertical Slice
One of the challenges I continually observe Scrum teams struggle with in their Agile adoption is the concept of vertical story slicing. As described by Wikipedia a vertical slice “refers to a cross-sectional slice through the layers that form the structure of the software code base.” For example, a simple ...
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Five Ways to Write Better Action Item
Writing specific, observable and repeatable Action Items with clear owners is an important skill for Product Owner and ScrumMasters to master (see my last post on why I feel this way). In Online Education at Applied Frameworks, we will give you plenty of opportunities to put this skill into practice as you ...
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Importance of Concrete Action Items
Retrospectives without concrete action items are pretty much a complete waste of time (and this coming from a guy who thinks the Retrospective is the MOST important discussion in Scrum!!). Over-and-over again, when I encounter teams and organizations struggling to adopt Scrum and Agile, I often find lame, uninspiring Action ...
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A Developer Can’t Be the Product Owner
The Product Owner on my team is also a developer on the team. Do you have any advice on using Scrum in such a scenario? SHORT ANSWER: Yeah - stop doing it! LONG ANSWER: In a healthy Scrum Team, each person fills only one Scrum role at a time. Having someone ...
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Build Working Agreements Fast
Working Agreements are one of the core compacts that all good Agile teams need and use. For those of you unfamiliar with Working Agreements, they are nothing more than agreed upon protocols created by the team govern their interactions and clarify expectations. They are different from Ground Rules which tend to be more ...
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