Understand What Your Customers Want with Agile User Story Maps

Quick post to point out two other blogs I recommend you read. User story mapping is an essential practice for every agile team. Have a read of Understand What Your Customers Want with Agile User Story Maps to get some background and then follow up with Anatomy of an Agile User Story Map for the details.

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Minimise Context Switching

Often if a team picks up too much work it is because they don’t fully understand, or can’t see, the cost associated with their action. Fortunately there is an exercise you can run with a team in 10 minutes to help them see first hand the cost of context switching. 3’s & 5’s 3’s and 5’s is really simple… Continue reading Minimise Context Switching

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Scale Engineering Effectively with Cross-Functional Teams

As companies grow they place ever greater demands on their IT (and/or Engineering) organisations. There are constant requests for assistance, be they from the CMO who is looking to get a better understanding of customers to the customer support team looking to keep costs stable while expanding to 24×7 support. If you’re a VP or Director of Engineering… Continue reading Scale Engineering Effectively with Cross-Functional Teams

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Is Burnover Preventing your Team from Achieving Consistent Velocity?

Burnover.  Another name for Stories or backlog items that are incomplete at the end of the current Sprint and fall into a subsequent Sprint.  Call it what you like, but if you want to reach your Agile Nirvana, then you need to develop better recognition, techniques for handling, and methods of prevention.  If not, then you… Continue reading Is Burnover Preventing your Team from Achieving Consistent Velocity?

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Planking and its Impact on your Agile Team

New Scrum teams may find meeting their sprint commitments hard, it can be awkward at first! In this post Randall explains what planking is and how to avoid it.

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Measuring the Velocity of Agile Teams

Velocity. By far the single most important word to any Agile team. Whether you are currently practicing Agile, looking to adopt within your organization or trying to achieve your Agile Nirvana, understanding Velocity is fundamental to achieving success with Agile.