Agile Advice - Working With Agile Methods (Scrum, OpenAgile, Lean)

I’m in Beijing with limited connectivity. I’ll be back to posting new material in early August. Thanks!

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Early today, Pete Deemer (who presented at the May 2005 Scrum Gathering - notes from his presentation are about 3/4 of the way down the entry), posted his experiences of using the Scrum framework, with adaptations to manage his personal life. He has graciously consented to sharing his story here.

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There is a nice comparison that can be made between loans and agile. My father, an agile coach now, describes the metaphor this way:

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An oldie, but a goodie, this short paper about Test-Driven Management is an excellent introduction to the topic. It is phrased in terms of the Extreme Programming practices, but it is generalizable to most types of agile work.

I have substantially updated the basic Agile Work Cheat Sheet and the Agile Work Cheat Sheet for Process Facilitators. Please check them out at the Berteig Consulting Inc. Agile Work Resources page.

I’ve written a few previous entries about the artifacts of Agile Work: the Work Item List (or Backlog), the Iteration Tasks, and the Record of Obstacles. But I’ve left the most important for last: the actual delivered final results.

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It’s official. Someone has done a fully-controlled experiment to prove that groups are better at solving problems than even the best individuals working separately. For example, a group of three people, was better than the three best people working independently.

Interesting entry about Agile Work practices being used in New York.

Check out Panta Rei - Everything Flows, Everything Changes. This blog, by author Jon Miller, has extensive archives well worth poking through.

The Process Facilitator has only a few key responsibilities. One of those is to remove obstacles that are preventing the team for completing its work quickly, effectively and with high quality. The team’s primary tool for tracking this work is the Record of Obstacles. Like the Work Item List, this is a fairly simple artifact.

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