Discovering the Narrative Behind Failure

Surprised by Failure? When your amazing idea results in unexpected outrage, do two things. Observe the Japanese proverb, When something goes wrong fix the process, not the blame. Then, discover the narrative. Tell the Story With 40,000 years under our belts, we Homosapiens have become excellent storytellers. From cave paintings to 3D movies the journey has

Value Stream Maps

Stopwatch Development? Learning to see is a bit more difficult than it may appear. If Ohno’s trainees found it hard to “see” manufacturing improvements, what’s a software manager to do? Looking over the shoulders of your development team, will only distract them. Holding a stop watch next to their monitors will likely result in outright

New Scrum Guide – Emphasis on Values

A Classic Apple Move On July 6th the creators of the Scrum Framework (Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber) discussed their highly anticipated update. Even though the move was due to popular demand, their emphasis on Scrum Values hit me more like a surprise Apple innovation. I was not expecting it, but ended up with something I can really use.

How to Decompose a Release Plan – User Story Mapping

A while back my team overcommitted themselves on a technical debt Sprint. It became apparent we did not have a decent model to expose those pesky “unknown – unknowns”. No matter how much talking and diagramming and more talking we did, we became none the wiser. We simply reached a point where we had to get started,