I was having a conversation once with an executive sponsor who was frustrated by friction between competing organizational silos. One silo adopted Agile, the other stuck with more traditional plan driven development. Each side mocked the other’s “head in the clouds” or “lost in the past” approach to projects. When I was asked what I thought about the situation I found myself saying something along these lines, “We (the Agile teams) have become very good at being open and coll

Like many folks I work in an environment where multiple methodologies are used. Some are insiders: the various and sundry Agile methodologies like Scrum, XP, Lean, etc. Others are outsiders: Waterfall, RUP, and so on. One thing I realized the other day was that it’s not enough just to make the “insiders” happy. The team can be as happy and cozy as peas in a pod with their Agile methodology, but if everyone else is miserable, then “Houston, we have a problem.” With that in min

I was facilitating a planning meeting with the team a week ago and it was not going well. We had our stories all ready to go before the meeting. The stories were well formed. All we had to do was come up with a list of tasks for each story. How long could that take? An hour? An hour later we finished the first of nine stories. It had taken us an entire hour to identify 3 tasks! It was like pulling teeth. I’d ask the team to provide a list of tasks…silence. I’d take different