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

How Detailed Should Business Requirements Be? Discovery Through Agile Gaming.

Tweet Last week, at New York Scrum User Group (NYSUG) monthly event, co-facilitated by  the agile coaches Dana Pylayeva and Emilie Franchomme, there were multiple agile games presented – all for different purposes and for all types of audience.  Above all, what really stood out was  the “Beautiful Meadow” game that helped with making a revealing … Read more

What Should Agile Leadership Care About?

Tweet Agile frameworks (e.g. Scrum, Kanban, XP), individuals’ roles & responsibilities, processes & tools, metrics & reporting, burn-up charts, estimation techniques, backlog prioritization, agile engineering practices, agile maturity models etc. – all of them are important attributes of a typical agile transformation.  However, NONE of them are first-degree-of-importance system variables that are responsible for transformation … Read more

Parallel Organization, As a Sushi Roll

Tweet When we ask an experienced scrum master, product owner or developer define a user story, they usually understand that “…every user story must be INVEST-able…(taken from B. Hartman’s post)”. When we further elaborate on the “INVEST” part, we discover that splitting a user story is done vertically (along features), not horizontally (along components e.g. … Read more

You Get What you Ask For: Agile Coaches-“Centaurs”

Tweet If you were a company’s CEO and had a very clear and urgent need to improve your organization, to stay competitive and successful in a marketplace, and therefore, were looking for guide-level senior advisers and coaches, whom you could trust and rely on during your challenging journey, who would you choose:  people on the … Read more

Sprint Length: Who Decides? How? Why?

What is the best Sprint length?  Who decides on Sprint length? Are there any exceptions?  What are some of the most common mistakes people make, when making decisions about Sprint length? Let’s start from grassroots and answer the following basic question: “What is Sprint main goal?”  And while looking for an answer, let’s refer to … Read more

Applying LeSS Thinking to Basic Scrum

As per Scrum Guide, “…Scrum is a framework for developing and sustaining complex products… It [Scrum] is lightweight, easy to understand and difficult to master”.  The guide talks about basic Scrum, or Scrum by one cross-functional team that works for only one Product Owner, on one single product.  The guide also mentions situations when multiple … Read more

Challenges with Agile Training: Examples, Reasons, Consequences

Virtual networks of professional agile coaches and trainers is good place to pick up some most thoughtful and provocative agile discussions.  The most reputable networks that I know of, and happen to belong to, are the communities of: Certified Enterprise Coaches and Certified Scrum Trainers (both, from Scrum Alliance), and Candidate Large Scale Scrum Trainers … Read more

Agile Role: Product Manager

Note: if you are interested in this role, please reach out directly by using the form at the bottom of this page. I will put you in direct touch with the hiring entity. I dont’ play the role of a middle-man. A talented Product Manager is wanted – to join the Product team. In this … Read more