Alan Dayley is back to help me continue the quest of figuring out why so many companies are struggling with PI Planning or quarterly planning. During the interview, we discuss some of the reasons organizations struggle with this type of planning. We address the topic from the perspective of senior leadership, why they want it, how they often approach it, and the challenges that creates. We also explore the way the request is often interpreted by the Development Teams, how they often respond, and how critical it is that they have the time needed to understand the request and the freedom to resp ..read more

You’ve decided to take a Scrum certification class. Now the question is, which one? If you are looking for something like Certified Scrum Master or Certified Scrum Product Owner, there are so many options to choose from that it can be overwhelming. All of them should result in certification and price is certainly a concern. But there are a number of other factors to consider when trying to find the Scrum training that is right for you. When you take a certification class, whether its focus is on Scrum, Lean, Kanban, Project Management, whatever… you are investing in yourself and your future. I ..read more

Keeping up with what is happening in AI is no small task. You probably know some folks who spend a lot of free time learning how to bend (insert AI flavor of the week) to their will, there are folks who are preaching to anyone who will listen about all the amazing things that are right around the corner, and then there are the folks who just periodically peek over their shoulder and say “Yeah, um… let me know when you’ve got this bit actually working.” And then there are people like Snehal Talati. I met Snehal last year at the Scrum Gathering and we did a podcast about http://aiagile.org, the ..read more

If you are on one of those teams that has made a habit of dragging unfinished work from one Sprint to the next... YOU NEED TO STOP!   When you get to the end of a Sprint and have work that isn't done, you can't show it to the stakeholders in the Sprint Review. If you don't show it to Stakeholders in the Sprint Review, you can't get feedback. And if you can't get feedback, you can't inspect and adapt, and you negate the entire point of working in a Sprint. This podcast offers five things that you and your team can do right now to stop carrying over unfinished work and start enabling Scrum ..read more

At the Modus Institute, Jim Benson and Mark Kilby have created a new offering called Successful Distributed Teams. This new course focuses on how to build strong remote teams, how to create a humane, healthy balance of productivity and accountability, and what tools you can use to make it all work. In this interview, Jim and Mark join me to discuss what happened when they combined the many years of experience they each have in shaping remote teams that work. We cover how the idea of remote work has changed over the past few years, what makes it so challenging, and things you can start doing to ..read more

A few weeks ago I interviewed Gil Broza about his new book, “Deliver Better Results: How to Unlock Your Organization's Potential". The book was designed to quickly provide actionable practices that organizations can utilize to improve their value delivery system. It focuses on understanding the fitness for purpose of your system of delivery, and how to employ his ten strategies to improve your level of maturity. During my prep for the interview and during our conversation, there was one thing that was stuck in my head. None of this works without trust. How can a traditional, potentially toxic ..read more

Gil Broza joins me for a podcast about his new book, “Deliver Better Results: How to Unlock Your Organization's Potential". During the interview, Gil and I discuss how he designed the book to quickly provide actionable practices that organizations can utilize to improve their value delivery system. Our conversation includes details on how to understand the fitness for purpose of your system of delivery, and how to employ his ten strategies to improve your level of maturity. The first chapter of the book provides an executive-level summary of the 10 strategies and how they work as well as an as ..read more

With the state of Agile as it is today, I find myself frequently wondering, “Is this the Darkest Agile Timeline”? Things have been getting a bit bleak lately in the Agile space. With the layoffs, the job market, and the fact that the business world has change fatigue and is tired of not getting what they expected from a way of working they’ve mostly only kinda half-done... Where’s the hope? For this podcast (and to find some hope), I reached out to George Schlitz because 1. George is way smarter than me and sees things I can only vaguely sense the shape of, and 2. His new company Adaptivity Gr ..read more

There seems to be a current trend where organizations that say they are doing PI planning or quarterly planning are making a decision for the teams about what must be delivered in the time box. The teams just accept the commitment because they either feel they do not have the agency to push back and say no to some of it or are too busy trying to finish up their last overcommitment to look at new work. So, they begin the new time box already behind and then assess the new work only to (shockingly) learn it is too much. Then they divide it up by the number of Sprints or weeks and that is how the ..read more

What do you do when your Scrum Master’s understanding of their role seems to be less about acting as a servant leader to the Scrum Team and more about making the team to work in a way that is most convenient for them? In this episode of the podcast, Jeff Howey joins me to talk through the real-life case of a Scrum Master who seems to have lost their way. Here are some of the concerns shared in the podcast: - Dev Team is offshore and holds a Daily Scrum before 8 AM in Scrum Master’s time zone. Scrum Master requires that they hold a second Daily Scrum to provide status to Scrum Master. - SM does ..read more