Agile is Dead, Long Live Agile

Published June 24th, 2011 Under Agile | Leave a Comment

Companies are incredibly disfunctional. Most managers have no idea how development works or how to make it better. No matter what process they try to use, many of them fall back into chaos. Jeff Sutherland highlights the most common failures in Agile projects and explains how to avoid them in your project and organization.

http://oredev.org/2010/sessions/agile-is-dead-long-live-agile

Self-Organization: The Secret Sauce for Improving your Scrum Team

Published November 23rd, 2009 Under Project Management, Scrum | Leave a Comment

High performance depends on the self-organizing capability of teams. Understanding how this works and how to avoid destroying self-organization is a challenge. Until you understand complex adaptive systems and how Toyota works it is difficult to improve team velocity. Jeff Sutherland discusses three core topics:
1. Shock therapy as a strategy for booting up teams.
2. The Cosmic Stopping Problem, otherwise known as the choice uncertainty principle.
3. Punctuated equilibrium – how software systems evolve

Take advantage of these concepts and you may find a way to achieve the ultimate potential of a team.

Scrum at Large: Managing 100 People and More

Published July 24th, 2009 Under Project Management, Scrum | 1 Comment

Scum is an easy technique to use in smaller teams and companies. Also a traditional project manager can adapt her project to most aspects of Scrum even if the surrounding business in unaware. But what about when the Scrum implementation gets really large? What if a whole telecom organization like SonyEricsson ran with projects with hundred people and more? What are the major impediments and how shall an organization overcome these? What gains should should the business expect. To what extent can a program manager choose to use Scrum for his programs and projects without the whole organization to adapt?

Hyperproductive Distributed Scrum Teams

Published December 5th, 2008 Under Project Management, Scrum | Leave a Comment

Dr. Jeff Sutherland is one of the co-creators of the Scrum software development process. He and Ken Schwaber invented Scrum in 1993. Since then he has worked with many software companies and IT organizations to extend and enhance this process.

The secrets of doing agile offshoring with success

Published September 25th, 2008 Under Agile, Scrum | Leave a Comment

In this interview from JAOO 2007 Jeff Sutherland and Serge Beaumont discuss the secrets of doing offshore development in an agile way based on their real life experience. Jeff Sutherland, Scrum co-founder, has been helping others to do agile the right way and Serge Beaumont works for Xebia, a company with an agile team divided between the US and India. Agile offshoring is not easy but Serge and Jeff suggests some best practices based on their experience. Part of the answer is communication and in Serges team they communicate through several channels.

Scrum Tuning: Lessons learned from Scrum implementation at Google

Published March 27th, 2008 Under Agile, Scrum | Leave a Comment

Adwords introduced a Scrum implementation at Google in small steps with remarkable success. As presented at the Agile 2006 conference this exemplifies a great way to start up Scrum teams. The inventor and Co-Creator of Scrum will use this approach in building the Google Scrum implementation to describe some of the subtle aspects of Scrum along with suggested next steps that can help in distributing and scaling Scrum in a “Googly way”.

Jeff Sutherland on Scrum and Not-Scrum

Published March 3rd, 2008 Under Project Management, Scrum | Leave a Comment

Scrum creator Jeff Sutherland guesses there are 120,000 Scrum teams holding standup meetings on any given working day. But how many are really doing Scrum? At QCon London 2006 he talked about “the Nokia test” which he likes to use to distinguish whether teams are doing Agile or only iterative process – or neither! He also revealed the connection between Scrum and the Mars robots.

http://www.infoq.com/interviews/jeff-sutherland-scrum-rules