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Building Up and Tearing Down

May 27, 2019
2 min

Building Up and Tearing Down

Recently I put on a public Leading SAFe training. This wasn’t your typical training, however. In collaboration with Ron Quartel, we tacked on an extra day to discuss FAST Agile. Now if SAFe is an example of a scaling framework, FAST Agile is perhaps a good example of what you might call a de-scaling framework. FAST uses an open space style of organization to provide only the most bare bones structure and guidance. It’s really quite elegant in its simplicity. Ron and I had bot

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My Personal Andon Cord

Apr 30, 2019
3 min

My Personal Andon Cord

Have you heard of an Andon Cord? On the assembly line it’s that cord you yank on to stop the entire line when a problem is found. The idea is to stop everything until the problem you encountered is fully understood and fixed. That way we take the time to improve the function of the assembly line so that those sorts of problems never slow us down again. It’s a little example of that “slowing down to go faster” that those crusty old software curmudgeons blather on about. But wh

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The Agile Gymnasium

Jan 12, 2016
5 min

The Agile Gymnasium

I used to be a weightlifter. All through college, and for much of my adult life I have been in gyms exercising in one form or another. I’ve had some modest success. The experience of joining a gym goes along some standard lines. You’ve probably done it yourself. You show up and they take you around the facility and orient you to the equipment. They may even go so far as to give you some very basic training. You get an introduction to circuit training and then they slap you on

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Agile Coaching and Training is a Scam

May 6, 2013
2 min

Agile Coaching and Training is a Scam

In the Agile world, coaches and trainers are distinctions that were created in order to create different ways of making money. They have no useful business purpose outside of filling the pockets of consultants with cash. How can I maintain this? Here’s how I see it now: I (used to) have friends who are trainers. They are normal people like you and me. They typically got their start as project managers and or scrum masters just like the rest of us. At some point they go throug

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Jul 2, 2009
2 min

Continuous Improvement & Risk

I witnessed an interesting pattern today while running Boris Gloger’s “The Ball Game” exercise with a team. The basic idea is to iterate a team activity, stopping to make improvements each iteration. The idea is to practice and measure the impact of continuous improvement on team performance of a task. In general, the team did as you might expect: the first iteration things were pretty rough and their performance wasn’t very good. In subsequent iterations, their performance c

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