How Long Should my Sprints be?

Author: Ram Srinivasan When organizations are adopting Scrum, they are always confronted with how long their Sprints should be. Scrum merely provides guidelines that Sprints can be anywhere from 1 week to 4 weeks long. The Sprint is a feedback loop, providing an opportunity for the  stakeholders and the Scrum Team to Inspect and Adapt (the product, and the … Read more

Coach’s Experience Report: Putting LeSS Teachings to Work

  The following Coach’s Experience Report describes various teachings of Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) framework in the context of their practical use by Agile Coach. What is below does not represent a single case with a single organization or company. Rather, experiences with multiple organizations, under different conditions are being described. By the same reasoning, … Read more

Agile Coaching – Lessons from the Trenches

Authors: Gene Gendel and Erin Perry High performing organizations, high performing teams, and high performing people do not often happen organically. They are a return on investment. We’ve spent time in the trenches, both giving and receiving coaching, at organizations of all sizes: from small startups to large enterprises. In this article, we will use … Read more

Unspoken Agile Topics

Author: Gene Gendel This paper, originally written in February 2013, brings to light some of the least-discussed topics and consequences of “broadband agilization” that currently take place in the industry. The materials of this paper are subdivided into two general sections: The first section describes certain impacts that Agile has on individuals and their personal … Read more

Scrum and Kanban at the Enterprise and Team Levels

Scrum, as the most structured of all Agile frameworks, is a great way to ensure predictable, strategically planned, incremental product delivery. Scrum ensures good responsiveness to frequently changing market demands. Although nonprescriptive, Scrum clearly defines certain roles, responsibilities, and ceremonies. Kanban, for the most part, is silent about certain aspects that Scrum suggests explicitly (e.g., … Read more

Feb 1-3, 2016. Certified LeSS Practitioner in New York

Author: Gene Gendel Event Details  Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) is a framework for scaling agile development to multiple teams. LeSS builds on top of the Scrum principles such as empiricism, cross-functional, self-managing teams and provides a framework for applying that at scale. It provides simple structural rules and guidelines on how to adopt Scrum in large product development. The … Read more

Fallacies of RAG Reports

Author: Gene Gendel How Much Can You Trust Your Navigation Instruments? 1944…Imagine you are flying back home from a risky military mission…If you are not able to vividly imagine what this experience is like, please follow this link:  https://www.keystepstosuccess.com/2016/01/b-17e-bomber-tight-coupling-of-color-coding-with-numerical-data/ RAG System in Conventional Project Management Today, the RAG system is still widely used in conventional project … Read more