Agile methods like scrum and XP are very exciting, especially when you are first introduced to them. There is something very common sense about the ideas in them that seems to resonate for a lot of people. I know it was that way for me. I’d looked at a lot of different project management methods before settling on XP (thank you Steve McConnell). A lot of those methods looked interesting, but XP was the first one that just made sense. For a young project manager looking for a

OK, Mr. Peabody, where are we going today? Well Sherman, Any time I explain what Scrum or XP is, I start with time boxes. The time box method has been around a really long time. The earliest record I can find in a casual search is where they were used at DuPont in the 1980s. I suspect that time boxes are much older than that. The time box basically applies a constraint to the system. It creates an arbitrary start and end date, usually on the smaller side. You commit to a fixe

Today I was listing to “The Splendid Table”, a great cooking show on NPR. They were talking about variation in growing heirloom tomatoes. Somehow, that got me thinking about agile teams (probably time to see the therapist again). It occurred to me that ideas like Agile are memes. Richard Dawkins defined a meme as “an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.” and Agile certainly fits that definition. Agile has spread from obscurity to world

How do you experience Agile? I’m not talking about the process, the rituals, or the artifacts. I’m certainly not asking you to regurgitate any of the usual Agile jargon. I’m talking about how it makes you feel. It usually starts with a question like, “Are you using Agile?” and I catch myself saying things like, “Yes, we do scrum.” Answers like that probably miss the point on a very fundamental level. What I think some people are really asking is, “What does it feel like to wo

Last week I led a session at Agile Open Northwest called, “Slowing Down”. The idea for this session was inspired by my own struggles with becoming quite over-committed to a variety of things (my job, my hobbies, etc.) and the resulting stress and crisis it has created for me. You see, the funny thing about it all was that even though I was perfectly aware of what I was doing by over-committing like crazy, I couldn’t seem to stop. The Introduction So I came to this session, no

Sessions Silo Busting w/Tom Perry and Lourdes Vidueira Yeah, that’s me. It was our big session. And just for the record, we rocked the house. In fact, the people attending our session made so much noise that people in sessions in the rooms adjacent to us complained about all the noise. What did I think? I think that means I’m doing a good job as a facilitator. Especially given the fact that there were only 10 people in the session. It was awesome! The feedback we received was

Conversations What can I say? The restaurant open bar last night was epic. Actually I wasn’t saying very much at all to anyone this morning… Sessions Keynote: What Forms of Work and Life Make Sense for Us? w/Brian Marick As usual Brian’s keynote was eccentric, enlightening, and above all else, unique. At about the halfway point he actually had the entire room stand up and he gave a tango lesson (which was no surprise, he had been talking about it on twitter for weeks). Still,

First a brief note on the important things: The breakfasts: While I don’t think anyone is going to beat last year’s xp2010 hotel in Trondheim for its extravagant breakfast buffet, it’s hard not to love having a churro and coffee for breakfast. Mmmm…churros! The timing: Just for the record – having your presentation take place on the last day of the conference sucks. I know, somebody has to draw the short straw, but I hate all the waiting. I just can’t relax and enjoy myself u

The first day of XP2011 got off to a good start today. As your roaming reporter I think I will break down my experience of day one into the following categories: Conversations, Tutorials, & After hours. Conversations Starting your own conference – Beer in hand, I stumbled into a conversation about holding a future XP conference in Vienna. What a fabulous idea! I’m currently playing a small role in helping with site selection for a conference in the pacific northwest, so I’m p

There is something about a well designed process that I find mesmerizing. It really doesn’t matter if it’s XP, Scrum, Lean, or Kanban the end result is the same: for some brief period I find myself seeing the patterns of the process everywhere I look. For example, a few months ago I finished reading yet another book on Lean (Poppendieck’s latest or something like that). There I was in the kitchen washing the dishes after dinner and wondering… …why I always did the dishes in s

I stumbled across a great quote from Dan Roam, “The heart of business is problem solving.” This is a great phrase. Why did he use the words he did? Take “heart” for example: it could refer to the central nature of problem solving – it is at the core of what we do in business. But when I see the word heart other associations arise for me. To me, heart refers to a sense of passion about something. It speaks to something that I love. Problem solving is a passion that we pursue –

In this wonderful blog post, You Are The Impediment, Mike Cottmeyer argues that there are three different levels of impediment management required of a good scrum master/team leader: The Tracker The Remover The Anticipator He characterizes this as a sort of competence hierarchy for agile managers: Tracking being the minimum one could do, Anticipating being the desirable thing to do. I strongly agree. I see it this way: Tracking = History Removing = Managing/Problem Solving An

As a coach, I’ve encountered a great deal of confusion when talking to teams about building a cross-functional team. Often, as soon as I mention the notion, the reaction is negative. People often seem to think of cross functional behavior as every person on the team being able to do every job on the team. The impression that they get is that they are being told specialization is bad, and generalization is good. I believe this is often exactly what some Agile advocates are thi

A few notes on this list: I tried to collect just the tools that are written specifically for the purpose of Agile planning. I know that a lot of teams use 3×5 cards and/or Excel for tracking and managing their projects. However, although you can use Excel to manage your planning process, Excel was not created with Agile planning in mind. So Excel doesn’t belong on this list. There are plenty of planning products that make the claim of being compatible with Agile planning. Fo

My first impression is that these are two applications that have come from very different backgrounds. ScrumWorks started off as a java based desktop application. Rally is based on an ASP model where the application and data are all hosted at a remote site. Both applications have grown their feature sets over the last two years with what appears to be 2 different objectives in mind. Rally has taken the approach of adapting to a wide range of customer needs, both Agile and tra