Scrum, Kanban, Agile and Lean
Tomas Björkholm
Need help refining your backlog and finding small MVPs?
I guess you, like the most of us, have a problem breaking work down to small but still valuable pieces and that your MVP (minimal viable product) is more or less the same as the project scope. If you recognize yourself in this than keep reading.
Doing Scrum with Multiple Teams: Comparing Scaling Frameworks
Our article about Scaled Scrum has been published on InfoQ. In the article we describe the basics of LeSS, SAFe, and Scrum@Scale and show the similarities and differences between them
You find the article about Scaled Scrum at InfoQ.
Enjoy!
Scrum med flera team
Att organisera flera Scrum team görs på en hel del olika sätt. Här beskriver vi likheter och skillnader mellan några av de ramverk som vi har stött på hos våra kunder och utbildare, LeSS, SAFe och Scrum@Scale.
Gemensamt för LeSS, SAFe och Scrum@Scale
I alla tre ramverken utgår man från att man i botten har vanliga Scrum-team som är tvärfunktionella och självorganiserande.
Man utgår också från att vi alltid försöker bryta ner kraven vertikalt, så att varje inkrement blir så litet som möjligt men ändå kan driftsättas separat.
Underförstått är även att man kör kontinuerlig integration och automatiserad regressionstestning, och att man efter varje sprint har en produkt som går att driftsätta ifall man så väljer.
New book from Crisp – Kanban in 30 days
Designed as a 30-day action plan, this book will help you understand and implement Kanban – and start seeing results – in a month.
Analyze your current situation and define your goals and wider strategic aims, and begin developing a plan to help you and your team confidently work towards achieving them. Involve your team into driving cultural change, learn how to prioritize, and organize tasks and projects to efficiently use your time and resources.
Create your own value stream map to better understand your processes and identify improvement areas, and adapt and use the features, tips, and examples to overcome challenges you may face when implementing Kanban. Pick up this book and experience the full results of this vital Agile methodology-fast.
Who this book is written for
If you want to simplify your processes, improve collaboration, and manage projects successfully, this guide to Kanban is an essential companion. read more
Lean Documentation
My amateur research has given me the insight that the three most important things for greater effectiveness and good quality are knowledge, knowledge and knowledge. Knowledge is best acquired through a dialog but a dialog is only efficient if it includes someone with knowledge. Unfortunately, there are situations when such a person is not around.
This article will help you write effective and useful documentation for those situations where documentation is the only available source of knowledge.
Read the full article at InfoQ
The House of Agile – A visualisation of the core of Agile
What is Agile, actually?
Have you ever asked yourself the question, ”what is Agile”? Ever been asked the question and found yourself looking for the easy answer? The true answer is of course that Agile is the Agile manifesto but do you know anybody who can recite the manifesto just out of his or her head? When asking what is Agle, it’s more likely you will get the answer that Agile is about being flexible or about high efficiency. Some will say Agile is about having a Scrum Master, daily stand-up meetings and notes on a white board. I think Agile is much more than that and in this post I will tell you the answer, the short answer, I have found after many years looking.
Is it important to know what Agile actually is? Yes, of course. If you don’t know, how can you know in which direction to change your way of working when you decide to go Agile. By the way, Agile is a direction how to improve your way of working, not a place or a fixed description of how to work.
To make Agile easy to understand I will borrow a symbol from Lean, the house
T-shaped people and U-shaped teams
I guess you have heard about T-shaped people, that is, people with deep skills within one or a few areas combined with some knowledge in many areas.
Now it’s time to introduce U-shaped teams. That is, teams that are balanced and where teammates are helping each other. It’s a team where you might have a bad day and are allowed to fail without causing consequences. It’s where the teammates help you get back to normal and what’s more make you feel comfortably included in the team. Your team becomes your safety net and it’s the place where you can dare to be vulnerable. U-shaped teams are also good for productivity since safety means productivity. *
Shorter version of: Responsibility the Agile way
A couple of months have passed since I wrote the post “Responsibility the Agile way” and I have refined it since then. Here is the new and more slim version:
1) I promise to look for improvements, both opportunities and problems.
2) I promise to participate in implementing the improvements. I will at least communicate the improvement possibilities I have found.
Responsibility the Agile way
I am a teacher of Agile methodologies which means that I teach collective responsibility. I often get the response that ”everybody’s responsibility is no one’s responsibility”. To make everyone really take responsibility we need to define what we mean with responsibility the Agile way. Here is at least my version:
We are all responsible for contributing with our intelligence and senses for the best of the product and the process. We are also responsible doing what we have said we will do and being transparent with our progress.
If you think that is too fluffy, here comes more details about what I think Agile responsibility means:
Pomodoro meeting
While reading a blog post by my Crisp colleague Anders Laestadius I remembered a meeting type I tried a few years ago. We called it “Pomodoro meeting” since it was timeboxed to 25 minutes, just as the time management technique Pomodoro.
This is how it was conducted:
Improve the improvement process
Do you do Scrum? I would guess that 90% of Swedish programmers would answer yes.
Do you have retrospectives? Again most developers’ answer is, yes.
Will you empty the impediment backlog before the next retrospective? Silence.
This post is for those of you who remain silent after the last question.
2:nd version of Kanban Kick-start
Kanban kick-start has been updated. What’s new? Not much but I met David J Anderson and after that meeting I felt I wanted to make some changes to be more compliant with the content of his course “Kanban for Managers”.
Please enjoy. http://www.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Kanban-kick-start-v2.pdf
If you like to have a version with the changes visualized, please let me know. tomas.bjorkholm(at)crisp.se /Tomas
Kanban Kick-start
For everyone who asks the question, how do we get started with Kanban. Here comes one way of kick starting a Kanban team.
Download the document from https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Kanban-kick-start.pdf
Enjoy reading and implementing
//Tomas Björkholm
Did you notice the big shift in software business
Maybe you didn’t notice it but there has just been a minor earthquake in the software business. The king has lost his crown; it’s a major shift in the hierarchy.
What happened was that Nokia announced collaboration with Microsoft. Normally, collaboration with Microsoft costs a lot and it’s worth it because your stock will go up like a rocket. What happened this time was that Nokia’s stock fell with about 10%. And what was even more surprising was that Microsoft paid for the deal. Rumours are saying billions of Euro. Google might give away things for free but Microsoft is now paying companies for including their software.
The fight between Apple and Google has got its looser, and it’s Microsoft.
The King is dead, long live the king