Gene Tweet On October 31-st, 2017, the Mayor of NYC Bill de Blasio signed the new Law, prohibiting companies in New York City from asking, searching or verifying a job applicant’s salary history during the hiring process. From now on, violation of this law, by any NYC-based employer, will be viewed as an “unlawful discriminatory practice.” … Read more
Tweet Nowadays, for too many organizations, Agile Maturity Metrics (AMM) have become a trusted way to measure improvements of agility at personal (individuals), team and organizational level. However, it is not always apparent to everyone that AMMs are different from Agile Check-Lists (e.g. classic example of Scrum Check list by H. Kniberg) and this can often … Read more
Tweet Tonight -a great presentation by Malik Graves-Pryor of Natoma Consulting, as he shared how his company leveraged LeSS to achieve stunning results, while facing challenges and learning lessons. Malik’s Summary At the Thursday October 12, 2017 NYC Large Scale Scrum Meetup, Malik Graves-Pryor shared his company’s LeSS case study, “Web and Mobile Applications Agile Transformation”. He … Read more
Tweet Last week, at New York Scrum User Group (NYSUG) monthly event, co-facilitated by the agile coaches Dana Pylayeva and Emilie Franchomme, there were multiple agile games presented – all for different purposes and for all types of audience. Above all, what really stood out was the “Beautiful Meadow” game that helped with making a revealing … Read more
Tweet Agile frameworks (e.g. Scrum, Kanban, XP), individuals’ roles & responsibilities, processes & tools, metrics & reporting, burn-up charts, estimation techniques, backlog prioritization, agile engineering practices, agile maturity models etc. – all of them are important attributes of a typical agile transformation. However, NONE of them are first-degree-of-importance system variables that are responsible for transformation … Read more
When people go to the doctor’s office, they often complain of superficial manifestations of a problem (i.e., “chief complaints”) that don’t present any serious concerns, but in reality, are indicators of a much more serious systemic illness. I’ve come to the conclusion that we in the Scrum field are also dealing with a similar type … Read more
Tweet When we ask an experienced scrum master, product owner or developer define a user story, they usually understand that “…every user story must be INVEST-able…(taken from B. Hartman’s post)”. When we further elaborate on the “INVEST” part, we discover that splitting a user story is done vertically (along features), not horizontally (along components e.g. … Read more
Tweet Lets kick off this post with the quote from another recent discussion that generated a number of strong comments from experienced professionals: “…as long as companies remain complacent and reliant on outlived staffing/head-hunting approaches, cold-calling techniques, and ineffective HR-screening processes, performed by people that poorly understand the essence of an agile coaching profession, while trying to … Read more
Tweet [also, cross-posted on less. works] Large Scale Scrum (LeSS). It is the framework for scaling agile development, done by multiple teams, as they work on same product and work for a single Product Owner. In order to be effective, LeSS requires organizational descaling that means simplification/flattening of organizational design. What is Organizational Design? … Read more
Tweet If you were a company’s CEO and had a very clear and urgent need to improve your organization, to stay competitive and successful in a marketplace, and therefore, were looking for guide-level senior advisers and coaches, whom you could trust and rely on during your challenging journey, who would you choose: people on the … Read more
