How Did Scrum Become a Straitjacket?

Posted by Michael James on March 19, 2012

The ideas behind Agile (before it was a buzzword) largely arose from practitioners looking to eliminate painful or silly management practices between them and their craft. When I first did Scrum, it was more fun than any way I’d worked before. As a member of a self organizing team, we negotiated Sprint Goals with the [...]

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The Team That Said No to KPIs

Posted by Michael James on February 16, 2012

If you’ve been following the work of behavioral economists and authors such as Dan Pink, or you’ve read my article What Your HR Department Doesn’t Know About Scrum, you already know that truely Agile organizations have abandoned last-century’s habit of treating employees as rats in a B.F. Skinner box with conditional punishments and conditional rewards, [...]

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Free Web Based Training: Introduction To Scrum, with quiz

Posted by Michael James on May 31, 2011

We’re beta-testing a web based training module to help people prepare for CSM classes, and counteract misconceptions spread by certain popular but uninformed YouTube videos. The early feedback has been encouraging. After we create additional modules, we’ll come back and polish this one up. Give it a try and let us know what you think. [...]

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Do Internal Departments Delight Their Internal Customers?

Posted by Michael James on May 22, 2011

At the Seattle Scrum Gathering I heard Steve Denning say that companies who don’t delight their customers won’t survive the decade. There’s no longer only three TV channels to choose from; the “You Take What We Make” era is over and now the customer is the boss. I’m wondering whether/when the same principle will start [...]

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The Backlog Refinement Meeting (or Backlog Grooming)

Posted by Michael James on April 15, 2011

The Backlog Refinement Meeting is also called Product Backlog Grooming, Backlog Estimation, and even Story Time. Ken Schwaber didn’t give it an official name in the original Scrum books but he did say the team should set aside a little time for this every single Sprint. For example, if you’re doing two-week Sprints, the team [...]

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Technical Debt Hits The Bottom Line at EBay

Posted by Michael James on January 11, 2011

Remember ten years ago, when online shopping brought “EBay” to mind? When I moved to downtown Seattle in 2001, I sold a barely-used sports car on EBay. A year later I bought a motorcycle on EBay. Bookmark on Delicious Digg this post Recommend on Facebook Share on Linkedin share via Reddit Share with Stumblers Share [...]

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