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Hackathon How-To
Recently, my company did its second-ever hackathon. It was somewhat thrown together, but I think the results were amazing. It provided all the scrum teams with a much-needed break from the everyday grind, but more importantly, it gave them the opportunity to work on something they felt passionately about. My company wants to give these…
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How do YOU increase your team’s velocity?
I don’t know about you, but making bigger estimates does NOT increase velocity. What are some ways you’ve measurably increased your team’s velocity without making bigger estimates?
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Don’t Take Daily Stand-ups for Granted
For the uninitiated, gathering every day for 15 minutes to discuss the goings-on of current work might seem a little redundant and useless. All the same people say many of the same things over and over again. But to the experienced, there’s a lot more to it than that.
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Traditional Project Management vs. Agile Project Management: Week 4
So in my current role of PM, I’m experiencing the NEED to babysit EVERYONE on this project far more than I have in the past as a Scrum Master. Here are some examples: No one is sharing information even after I’ve requested it. I have to pull it from them. For instance, I had no…
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What is it like being married to an agile coach, anyway?
On 03/11/14 7:31 AM, Robert Neil wrote: ——————– Do you do private agile training? I think being agile is very important when participating in projects that require difficult positions.I would like you to show me how to properly scrum my wife. As a coach would you actually assist, or just give verbal advice during the “meeting”?…
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Some Thoughts on Scope Creep
According to wikipedia (and various other sources), scope creep is defined as follows: Scope creep (also called requirement creep and feature creep) in project management refers to uncontrolled changes or continuous growth in a project’s scope. This can occur when the scope of a project is not properly defined, documented, or controlled. It is generally considered harmful. In an agile project, however, sometimes uncontrolled…
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How many types of Agile Retrospectives are there, anyway?
The other day I noticed that we were getting pretty stagnant with our sprint retrospectives. I have been asking these questions: “What went well? What went less well? What areas improved from last sprint? What areas need improvement?” Sometimes we get some good discussions going, but most of the time I have to prod my…
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How to Give a GREAT Demo!
One of the major tenets of Agile is the Product Demo. As we all know, agile encourages us to demo at the end of our sprints. This is done for several reasons. Not only does this keep us accountable to our customers, but it helps us to focus on forward thinking. At many companies, it…
Scrum Bubbles 