Top Posts from the Agile Blog

Escalation is Killing Agile – Can We Please Stop It?:
Jean Tabaka takes a hard stand against the fighting that is occurring within the Agile community, and makes a personal commitment to focus her energy engaging in dialog with the voices of engagement, deeper intention, non-blame and creative inquiry.

The Opposite of Waterfall is Pond – A Metaphor for Agile
A fun analogy describing the difference between Waterfall and Agile development projects. Great one to share with people who are new to the concepts.

Are PMOs Obsolete in Agile?:
Is there still a need for the Project Management Office within Agile Organizations? Jean Tabaka explores all sides of the argument in this provocative post

Stop Over-Committing! – Rethinking Utilization Limits
Find out why you should be capping your individual capacity at 70%

Brutal Prioritization in Agile: cut costs by NOT building the fluff:
According to The Standish Group Survey, only 20% of all delivered software features are “often or always used”. For a team under the pressure of today’s economy to do more with less, here is a way to conceptually cut 80% of your effort and still deliver the high-value essentials.

Learning from “Toyota’s Secret” – The A3 Report:
After testing Toyota’s A3 method at a quarterly planning session, Ryan shares his takeaways and explains why he was positively surprised with the process.

8 Ways To Re-Tool a PMO in an Agile Environment:
Expanding upon her popular “Are PMOs Obsolete in Agile?” post, Jean identifies 8 ways to save our PMOs from going the way of the dodo bird.

Whats in a name, like Burndown Chart?:
Why did Jean Tabaka call foul when a customer requested individual team tracking via burndown charts? View this refresher on the true purpose of burndown charts to find out!

Question: 7+2 = 5, 9 or 11? Agile May Give You a Surprise:
How does your team add up? High-performance teams have a collective high goal for which they hold themselves mutually accountable. It is about the team and its commitment to one another and their goal.

Why Do You Develop and Operate Software?:
Without a clear vision and mantra, it is hard to answer the question, Why do you develop and operate software? As you and your software team/organization undoubtedly ask the core versus context questions in your business, Ryan has been providing thinking tools for analyzing your portfolio in these turbulent times.

Where to Turn in a Downturn Economy?:
If you are looking to Agile and how it can cut costs for your organization, consider the power of your teams. Work to engender trust and promote an ability to have constructive conflict. Empower your teams and amplify the learning that teams bring to organizations.

Agile Cuts Costs Through Productivity Improvements:
Just getting to the first step of Agile maturity can lead to 10 to 20% productivity increases. According to Tom and Mary Poppendieck, most software development organizations are only spending 6% of their time doing value-added tasks. The other time is wasted

Rally Comes in Right behind IBM in Gartner ALM marketscope:
In December, our friends Jim Duggan and Thomas Murphy at Gartner completed a long-anticipated report on what they call the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) space. This report is what Gartner calls the “ALM Marketscope” and it is a broad evaluation of the ALM market and the providers within it. There’s good news in the report from both a Rally/vendor standpoint and a customer standpoint.

Hows Your Bathwater? Or, Are Defects Clogging Your Drain?:
Don’t let defects clog your feature bathwater. Use Agile to stop the defect clogs and keep the value water flowing!

Agile Cuts Costs, Doesn’t It?:
Don’t just assume Agile is a silver bullet; evaluate whether it really does cut costs; determine whether your Agile adoption is reaping you adequate cost savings; and, what to do if your Agile adoption is not cutting costs.

Balancing Short-term and Long term agility:
Ryan Martens provides an example Agile Adoption strategy by using the highly regarded Shareholder Value matrix from Hart and Milstein.

True Sustainability Thriving today through EcoSphere:
The IT industry is on the road to becoming a larger emitter of CO2 than the airline industry by 2020. The Ecosphere, developed by two NASA scientists, is a completely closed world that is self-sustainable. Ryan’s keeps him focused on the long road of continuous improvement needed to make the IT industry a zero carbon footprint or sustainable industry.

Using a Product Council to Steer Your Development:
If you want your team to be able to make a commitment around 8 weeks of backlog, you need to do somewhat more prep than you would with vanilla Scrum. And if you want your team to meet that commitment, you need a mechanism to manage your stakeholders to minimize backlog churn. One mechanism to solve this problem is a Product Council.

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