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ACCDE19 Survey: The One Book
This year’s Agile Coach Camp 2019 Germany was the 10th time we gathered in beautiful Seminarzentrum Rückersbach to have 3 days of exhausting, inspiring, and connecting Open Space. At the very first coach camp in 2010 I started to do a spontaneous survey with one simple question: “Which ONE book should I read?” This year…
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Solution-Focused Team Coaching Structure
As Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches we have the daily challenge to reflect our own behavior and to identify what we should do differently. The Solution-Focused Team Coaching Structure gives guidance to self-reflection and identification of goals, possibilities and actionable next steps. Based on the structure used in solution-focused coaching, we begin with a concrete…
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Why you will fail with Scrum
Finally here is an English translation of my article “Kein Erfolg mit Scrum” (no success with Scrum) in German which describes several reasons why you will fail with Scrum. Feel free to download it here: Marc Bless – Why you will fail with Scrum You will learn some things about the cycle of failure, local optimization, ineffective…
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The Untrained Team
“Patience. Discipline.” Undead NPC, Undercity, WoW Successfully getting to Agile requires two important abilities — patience and discipline: Patience of the ScrumMaster to let the team self-organize and learn to improve. This may sound contrary to the drive-driven personality a ScrumMaster must have. But it is important for every driver to power up an engine and just let…
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Book: Mike Cohn – Agile Estimating and Planning
Everyone getting agile has to read this book! Author: Mike Cohn Title: Agile Estimating and Planning http://bit.ly/1JA1Cr Rating: highly recommended! This book is just a must have and a must read! Mike Cohn describes all important aspects and concepts of estimating and planning in an agile approach. Lots of real-world examples show how…
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Generalize Your Specialized Generalists
The software developers in a well-known Scrum team have undergone a transition from generalists to specialists in former times. They have been responsible for no specific parts of the software system. Every developer was assigned to the next high priority tasks regardless of knowledge and experience. Combined with classical waterfall project management, solo programming, missing code…
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Drive-Driven Personality
There was heavy “agile fun” in the last months with all the agilists working close with me. We made lots of wordy jokes like “the goal is the goal”, “the way is the way” which became things like “way-driven driving” and nonsense like that. Thinking of all these things all the time made me come…
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Book: Mike Cohn – User Stories Applied
Everyone getting agile has to read this book! Author: Mike Cohn Title: User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development http://bit.ly/POrak Rating: highly recommended! During any approach to implement agile procedures in an organisation there is a need to explain how management and engineering of requirements should work. Coming from traditional waterfall projects most…
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Guerilla Scrum: How to force organisational change
Situation Many organizations do not dare to change themselves although everyone knows that things do not work well. Usually real working employees have a good feeling that things are going wrong. Unfortunately they do not have the power to trigger change but expect middle management to do so. Usually top management expects everyone to…
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Personal Taskboard: Evolution to Mobile
The major disadvantage of a wall-based personal taskboard is its pure static character. You can’t take it with you for travelling or for working on it at home. Here’s the solution: the mobile personal taskboard. Side note: this version of the personal taskboard is not used by myself but I like the idea a lot.…
