Over the course of the last 3 months, I have been coaching my team through a transition to scrum development. This hasn’t been simply an exercise in trying something new for the sake of something new; this move has been an attempt to alleviate the problems caused by years of technical debt and unsustainable work practices that have resulted in significant points of pain for our organization. While I would certainly like to get into the why (and that will almost certainly be a topic for a different post), I’d like to focus on some of the details as to how we have chosen to execute the transition. Continue reading Moving to Agile: Strategy →

An interesting observation as I work with several teams to migrate a very waterfall process to Scrum: it is ridiculously easy to let the tools and the ceremonies become pro forma exercises rather than thoughtful representations of the spirit of what we’re doing.

I think that the biggest value I add as a coach has been to remind entire teams—regularly—to focus on the spirit of the manifesto rather than following the “rules” for using the tools or ceremonies. The tools do not define our process, the tools are there to facilitate our process. Something to remember.