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Inside the Bubble

We’re all pretty much living in ‘The Bubble.’ Like the recent SNL skit called it, we’ve designed “a planned community of like-minded free thinkers, and no one else” for ourselves. We hang out with friends who agree with us (the definition of a friend), block cranky commenters (and bad grammarians), and unfollow (but stay friends) […]

Tend Your Garden First

Sometimes the best answer is not improving the existing service or product, but chucking it for something new.

Setting CLEAR Agile Goals

CLEAR goals encourage executives to work together with the development team to set the stage for successful large Agile projects.

5 Steps to CLEAR Agile Goal Setting

After determining a company’s quarterly business goals, then the products and services that will support them, executives and managers often don’t take the next step of collaborating with the folks on the ground before considering the goals complete

Inception: Choosing Your Leadership Team

Large Agile projects need a dedicated leadership team that has a common vision, yet is collaborative and open to new ideas. This video describes a few attributes of a good leadership team when starting a large agile project.

Status Reporting

Boy, I wish we could get rid of status reports all together--especially the awful 'red/yellow/green' reports, which are pure fiction. Here's a few recommendations on how to deliver useful status reports to your executives (even if you have to include a color).

Scrum of Scrums Facilitator

Sometimes, having a facilitator, especially for young teams, makes sense. This video provides a few recommendations for the attributes of a good Scrum of Scrums facilitator.

Scrum of Scrums

Scrum of Scrums is a regular meeting where team leads gather to talk and, as much as possible, be open about project challenges, root out dependencies, brainstorm solutions, and make commitments that will move the project forward. This post gives a few suggestions for holding a successful meeting.

Agile Status Reports: Do We Need Them?

I wish we could do away with status reports all together, but we need to make sure our clients and executives know what's going on quickly. Kill the red/yellow/green and go with the facts.

Is Scrum Certification A Good Idea?

There's been a lot of debate about whether or not you should get a Scrum Master Certificate. There’s even more debate about which certificate to get.

The Pros:

The best aspect of a generic certification is that there is at least some evidence that the person who has the certification has heard the basics of the craft. As an employer, you can’t always test each applicant for basic knowledge. The notation of a certification on your resume can speed things up.

Of course, if the practice is complex--like brain surgery--you want to make sure your applicant knows more than the basics, so rigorous certification and licensing processes are needed. 

One of the positives about Scrum certification, versus, say getting a license to practice medicine, is the certification is not very expensive. You can get an online certification for a few hundred bucks, or attend an in-person class and test for about $1,200.