Are you considering moving from Scrum to Kanban?
Why evaluate Kanban? Are you considering moving from Scrum to Kanban? Let’s explore that a bit. Kanban is known as an Agile way of working. You may have heard the description of Agile being an umbrella with multiple approaches to work being under this broad umbrella. This list, under the big umbrella, often includes Scrum, […]
Getting Past Boredom: How ‘Training from the Back of Room’ helps Coaches
I grew up in a family where getting in front of an audience was routine, but even at a young age I discovered my enthusiasm for a subject may not automatically transfer to my audience. Leveraging voice inflection, hand gestures and humor only goes so far. There were times as a Scrum Master, trainer or […]
Competing Values Framework and Why it Matters for Agile Transformations
We’re going to walk through a couple of tools that we’ve found particularly useful for Agile adoptions, for coaching teams, and for working with individuals. The first in this video series is what we call the Competing Values Framework based on the work of University of Michigan. The Competing Values Framework comes into play when […]
New Rocket Nine Logo
Some of you might have noticed Rocket Nine has a new look. That’s right. We got a new logo and theme colors in the spring of this year and have been slowly rolling them out starting with re-vamped course materials. The Symbolism The new logo has three elements: Dots, Line, and Wordmark. The Dots relate […]
The Anchor Slowing Down Your Product Development
Great product. Smart Product Owner. Great marketing and sales. So why are you slowly losing market share over the last few years? Technical debt. Technical what? It’s like credit card debt – you can pay now or pay later, but you’ll pay a lot more later. And if you’re like most companies, you’re paying a lot […]
Correcting Assumptions via Systems Thinking
Identifying the system your assumptions build is a giant first step in helping teams improve. Let’s use systems thinking to briefly examine a causal loop that either increases or decreases the team’s confidence. We begin with the assumption that “teams must be held accountable, because people do not naturally hold themselves accountable.” The domino effect this […]
The Time to Fix Your Code Will Never Come
It’s a strong statement, but I have not yet seen that developers are “given” the time to fix the cause of problems. These problems can be post-release surprises, hard-coded values that multiply change efforts (and risk), manual configuration, testing and deployment, duplicate logic and logic spread across many areas of the system, multiple languages (due […]
You’re as Agile as Your Code Base
Problems I see fairly regularly are tied to the code base and development team practices. You might have a Lousy Code Base if… Scrum calls for building a potentially shippable product increment every sprint, but if team members (and worse, teams) integrate late in the sprint, it’s going to be problematic. “What’s QA doing the […]
Stories of Agile Change from Companies Succeeding with Agile
Our Agile Leadership Summit is coming up, and we are excited about the sessions. In our classes, a common request is real stories of change and succeeding with agile. We have two leaders from local companies part-way through their agile journey. Colleen Kirtland is a Director of QA at Pacific Life, and found success with […]