Archive for category lean
Impediment Colored Glasses
Posted by David Bland in agile, lean, scrum, scrumban on November 19, 2011
impediment – a hindrance or obstruction in doing something: “an impediment to progress”.
When you are an acting ScrumMaster or Agile Project Manager, it is common to seek out impediments so that you can help to remove them. Before you know it, impediments seem to be all around you ranging from the individual, team and organizational levels. A person can quickly feel consumed and overwhelmed by this new found responsibility.
A few years ago I was having a conversation with a colleague about all of the impediments I’d uncovered and how I needed to remove them as soon as possible. About half way through the conversation he interjected “These are not impediments, these are merely the tasks we need to complete our user stories”.
Then it dawned on me, I was so focused on removing impediments that I had begun to view our tasks as blockers to progress.
I was wearing impediment colored glasses…. [Read More]
Stop Blaming Waterfall
Posted by David Bland in agile, lean, waterfall on July 19, 2011
I’m here to let you in on a little secret, waterfall isn’t the reason your project failed. Waterfall isn’t the reason you were fired. Waterfall isn’t the epitome of evil in the world of software development.
Blaming waterfall for all of your woes is not unlike blaming the screwdriver you used to paint your wall. It isn’t the screwdriver’s fault you chose the wrong tool for the job.
Waterfall works well when both the problem and the solution are known.
Since I always get chastised for this statement, let me clarify that I’m not the first person to state this and also let me clarify that we never fully know anything.
So if I were to rephrase this for the word police, it would be:
Waterfall works well when both the problem and the solution are mostly known.. … [Read More]
Introducing Kantban(tm)
Posted by David Bland in agile, humor, lean on April 1, 2011
As you know, Kanban became popular years ago with the Toyota Production System and has recently been superfitted to software development practices. While the Agile & Kanban communities are fighting over which philosophy is better, a courageous few have risen above the fray to introduce the next evolution of Kanban dubbed: Kantban Pronounced “kah-yunt-bah-yun”, this [...]
We’re Self Organizing Into… Kanban?
What’s Kanban?
It isn’t a question you’d expect to hear from a team adopting work in progress limits and just in time tasking while only committing to small user stories.
One of my favorite aspects of being a ScrumMaster and Agile Coach is witnessing a team evolve by inspecting and adapting over time. Granted it isn’t a ride for the faint of heart, but it can be an extremely fascinating experience. This is especially true when the team feels empowered enough to mold themselves into a highly functioning unit.
From my experience, this becomes most apparent during iteration retrospectives… [Read More]
The Evolution of Done
Posted by David Bland in agile, lean, scrum on March 11, 2010
Many of you are probably familiar with the concept of done as it relates to iterative software development. It comes in many flavors, from working lines of code to acceptance criteria, and can change from tasks to features to releases. While I agree as a community we should continually grow the definition of done, only [...]
