Thoughts by Rick Waters, CST

Rick Waters is a Business Agility Coach and Trainer, from Chicago, with more than 15 years of technical software development experience, and almost 10 years of Agile leadership experience.  Rick primarily trains Scrum, Enterprise Scrum Business Agility, and Kanban. This is what Rick wrote, in support of the recently released book by Gene Gendel (Adaptive … Read more

Why Is LeSS Authentic? Why Should Leadership NOT Exempt Itself from Learning LeSS?

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) is an agile framework that has a history of implementations, trials & errors, experiments and experience reports collected and documented throughout more than a decade. LeSS is Scrum, performed by multiple teams (2-8) that work on the same widely defined product, for the same Product Owner. LeSS stresses the importance of … Read more

May 19-22: Global Scrum Alliance Gathering | AUS-TX

An amazing 2019 Global Scrum Alliance Gathering (May 19-22), organized by SA staff that brought together a record-high number of professionals from around the globe and had countless amazing events – too many to describe them all in one newsletter. 🙂 Here, I would like to  recap what committed to my memory the most: Keynote … Read more

Tips To Run ‘Big’ Retrospectives

For any team that uses scrum framework, a retrospective is a mandatory event that takes place at the end of each sprint.  It is an opportunity for a team to reflect on their most recent learning, while it is still fresh in everyone’s mind.  There are many tips, techniques and tools for running a retrospective.  … Read more

BABA Meetup – Does Agile Really Work in Sales?

Business Agility is at the top of conversation in the workplace. The Big Apple Business Agility (BABA) MeetUp launched on Monday, March 11, with an interactive presentation, “Does Agile Really Work in Sales?”, by Marina Alex, Business Agility Transformation Coach. Marina related several of her experiences applying agile to sales, from banks, to an Agile … Read more

Sept 13 -14 | 3rd Global LeSS Conference | NYC

Tweet Unforgettable 2 days at the 3rd Global LeSS Conference, at Angel Orensanz Foundation – the historical landmark in NYC. Conference Space and Our People Experience Report by Guest-Blogger Ram Srinivasan Though I have been associated with the Large Scale scrum (LeSS) community for about five years (though the “community” did not exist,  I can … Read more

Centralized vs. Decentralized Coaching

Key Takeaways Read the original post on InfoQ.  There is a frequently seen confusion with respect to the definition of agile coaching: coaching focus (e.g. enterprise vs. team) is confused with coaching alignment (centralized vs. decentralized) within an organization Centralized coaching departments run the risk of turning into a single-specialty organizational silos that are locally … Read more

Proper Scaling of Scrum and Dynamic Financial Forecasting

Tweet The purpose of this post is to summarize two very important and independent topics and then integrate them together, into a joint discussion.  The topics are: Moving from rigid annual budgets to rolling forecasts (super important! in agile/adaptive product development environments) Quality of scaling in agile product development, specifically Scrum …and tying effective scaling of … Read more

December 6th-8th: Certified LeSS Practitioner Course With Craig Larman | NYC

Tweet Another Large-Scale Scrum Training (CLP), taught by Craig Larman in NYC, is in the CompuBox. More than thirty people from all-around the globe (North America, South America, Europe) came together for this brain-jelling learning experience! The group consisted of product owners/managers, software engineers, managers and organizational design consultants (scrum masters, coaches and trainers) – … Read more