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Ponderings
As I read and think more and more about entrepreneurship, business models, business practices (especially agile project management, product development, and customer development methodologies), and how...
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Advertising Should Not Be a Zero-Sum Game
The latest edition of FastCompany has an article by Adam L. Penenberg (author of the upcoming book Viral Loop) entitled Loop de Loop which is noted as being an adaptation of the aforementioned book....
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Seth Godin on New Marketing
Seth Godin has a new post (“The platform vs. the eyeballs“) up about how marketing used to be about renting an audience (“we want this size of a TV audience at such and such a time”) and the metrics...
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Speaking of blocking ads automatically…
Lifehacker has a post describing Arora, an open source browser that comes with a lot of built in functionality, including ad blocking – something that others have been talking about and which I...
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Guaranteed Failure
Tobias Mayer has a great quote that I just learned about, “Scrum guarantees failure in 30 days or less.” It’s so true – in a good way, of course. Better to fail within 30 days and get back on track...
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Slavery
Jack Milunsky has a brief post up over at AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com wherein he discusses the issue of switching stories mid sprint. One of his points that I’d like to draw attention to is his...
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Coworking with Ourselves
My company has gone to lengths to ensure that employees can work from anywhere in the world (provided they have an internet connection). Since I live 70 miles (80 – 150 minutes, depending on traffic)...
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Why We Dropped Ideal Hours
Since converting to Scrum, my team has been in the practice of planning our capacity for a sprint in terms of ideal hours. We had a fairly simple spreadsheet where we’d enter the number of vacation...
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Paying Down Our Technical Debt
One of the biggest problems (if not the biggest problem) we have on our team is technical debt that has accumulated over the last 4-5 years. Fortunately, the team and our Product Owners understand the...
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Spring Conferences
I’ll be attending Agile Coach Camp 2010 – a bar camp for agile practitioners being held in Durham, NC, March 19-21. I and a colleague will be able to be there for the entire weekend and hopefully meet...
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Scrum & Employee Performance Plans
Our company has been in the habit of doing periodic EPPs (Employee Performance Plans). We’ve evolved from doing them once a quarter to once every four months to twice a year. We’ve gradually...
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Waterhocking
Today was the opening of AgileCoachCamp 2010 (#ACCNC) here in Durham. So far, we’ve had a few rounds of lightning talks which were limited to 3 minutes and no slides as well as a lot of networking and...
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IT Experimenting with Kanban
On Monday of last week, our network and desktop support team (what we call our “IT Team” as distinct from our software development teams) began experimenting with Kanban as our project management...
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Tweaking our Backlog Review Meeting
A number of recent problems has caused our team to tweak our weekly Backlog Review meeting. Specifically, we’ve added two items to the agenda: 1) a review of the stories tentatively scheduled for the...
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Changing Our Retrospectives
I’ve been thinking a lot about retrospectives lately both because our team has been struggling with them being ineffective/wasteful and because retrospectives were the subject of conversation at the...
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SimplyBox and Decentralized Collaboration
Update: This post has been modified following clarification of a few points by SimplyBox. ReadWriteWeb has a nice writeup of SimplyBox, a new product from SocialCast intended to bring activity streams...
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Conditions for Allocation Based Project/Portfolio Management
Imagine you have a single organization (choose your own scale: a single team or a group of teams arranged into a single, bigger organization). Now imagine that you have multiple – perhaps many –...
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Contained Failure
I assume that almost everyone has by now heard the maxim “fail early, fail often” at least once. I hope everyone has also heard the explanation that the point is not to fail early and often per se but...
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DollarShaveClub.com
Via Evolving Excellence, I’ve learned of DollarShaveClub.com, which is noteworthy for two reasons: 1) it is a cool business model, in my opinion, and 2) they have an absolutely fantastic introductory...
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Interests vs. Positions
The Story Imagine a couple, Bob and Alice. Every Friday, they go out to see a movie. Today is Friday. They have yet to choose which movie they are going to see. Bob doesn’t have a strong opinion...
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Widening Your Options – Part 1
The High Level Issue In my post about Interests vs Positions, I alluded that the parties involved in my fictional example could also have improved their outcome if they had widened their options – but...
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