Tag: featured

Hiring a Professional Product Owner

One of my customers is asking me about the accountabilities of a Product Owner and how they break down. While I had seen many things around the Scrum Master for my post on Hiring a Professional Scrum Master, this was a little bit more of a discovery session, which is why I asked some of […]

Hiring a Professional Scrum Master

One of my customers is hiring for the Scrum Master Role and asked if I had a handy-dandy Scrum Master Job Spec that they could use. I did not, but there have been a few good ones floating around in the ether so I thought that pulling one together would be a good idea anyway. […]

Become the leader that you were meant to to be

Leadership is not about control, but about inspiring those around you. Managers transition to Leaders As organisations move towards modern management practices there will be less of a need for Managers. However that does not mean that those same people are not needed! Their role is shifting from managing people, to managing effectiveness and leading […]

All technical debt is a risk to the product and to your business.

If you were buying a car, or a TV, you as the purchaser would do your best to understand the product that you are buying, the quality tradeoffs, and the capabilities. So why is so much of software opaque to the business? Why does the business have a fire-and-forget mentality and little interest in understanding […]

What is Taylorism, and why Waterfall is just the tip of the iceberg!

For many people the traditional project management methodologies (see PMI / PRINCE2) are the root of the problems that birthed Waterfall. I assert that this is the tip of the iceberg. These methodologies are just a symptom of a greater problem that has its roots in the changes made during the industrial revolution. These changes, […]

Story Points & Velocity are a sign of an unsuccessful team

Story Points and velocity have been used for many years in the Scrum community and have been engrained so much in the way that things are done that most folks believe that they are part of Scrum. The accepted wisdom is that Scrum Teams are supposed to use User Stories, Story Points, and Velocity to […]

Evidence-based Management: Gathering the metrics

Gathering the metrics for Evidence-based Management in software organisations can be a strenuous task and I have a number of customers that are fretting on what to collect and from where. Here I try to create an understanding of the ‘what’ that we need to collect.

Online is the new co-located

In light of the new normal and the last 20 years of technological progress, we need to re-define co-location as we no longer need to be in the same room as each other to get the 80% of communication that is non-verbal. If we are participating in an online event, we should try our best […]