The Penguin Principle for Agile transformations
I was in the fifth and final round for a Product Owner position. I remember being tired of responding to all kinds of questions, often the same I had answered before.
Especially considering I already jumped through quite a few hoops— I had completed a personality test and an intelligence…
What makes the Scrum Master role so extraordinarily demanding?
If you’ve seen Scrum being introduced at a company, then you probably have seen this before. The company is starting with Scrum and a Scrum Master is suddenly needed.
The company asks a team who wants to be a Scrum Master. …
Splitting User Stories into more User Stories often means you are deceiving yourself (and your users too!)
Nussi Einhorn posted the following picture on LinkedIn:
The left-hand side of the image portrays a confusing mess of User Stories. Try scanning them and getting the gist — you won’t.
The right-hand side of the picture showcases a crisp and clear alternative by using descriptive titles that summarize the…
Crafting a clear and overarching Sprint Goal during Sprint Planning
Boxer Mike Tyson once said:
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” — Mike Tyson
In military warfare a similar saying exists:
“No battle plan survives contact with the enemy.” — Helmuth von Moltke the Elder
No matter how much time you spend planning, you can…
I hate making mistakes. I am a perfectionist at heart.
However, when you do complex work, the more you try to prevent mistakes, the more mistakes you'll actually make. Nothing you do will prevent getting some things wrong the first time around.
You're limited by what I call the fog…
The do’s and don’ts to maximize your chances of meeting deadlines
“We have to integrate a new Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool in our checkout flow four weeks from now.” I heard Vivian, our Product Owner, say.
I was the Business Analyst on the Scrum Team and I responded with: “Why the hurry? This is the first time we hear about…
Having Product Managers and Product Owners working together is crazy and ineffective.
If you need Product Managers and Product Owners to scale your Scrum, then you are fixing the wrong problem.
First, make sure you have self-managing, empowered teams that don’t act like a hungry caterpillar to be fed tickets…
Without self-managing and empowered teams you’re just doing Agile window-dressing
The most dysfunctional Agile transformations I’ve seen happen because companies try to copy-paste an Agile framework or scaling framework. This is especially true for bigger companies.
At the core of Agile and Scrum are self-managing, empowered teams. This usually comes more naturally to start-ups and scale-ups.
More layers, hierarchy, silos…
Maarten Dalmijn
145+ articles with > 1.5 million views on beating the Feature Factory and better ways of delivering value together. https://mdalmijn.com
