Scrum

The problem that I frequently see crop up is that people have a tendency to treat the Daily Stand-up as simply individual reporting. “I did this … I’ll do that”—then on to the next person. The more optimum approach is closer to a football huddle. A wide receiver might say, “I’m having a problem with that defensive lineman,” to which an offensive bl

“People don’t multitask because they’re good at it. They do it because they are more distracted. They have trouble inhibiting the impulse to do another activity.” In other words, the people who multitask the most just can’t focus. They can’t help themselves.

it’s pointless to look for evil people; look instead for evil systems.

People assume other people are making sound judgments, even if those judgments contradict their own. This is bad. When you’re making a judgment about when you’ll likely deliver a multibillion-dollar project—or whether you’ll get everything done on time for your wedding day—it’s critical to apply your own judgment, and use other estimates to improve

The key is to acknowledge uncertainty, to fully accept that your current snapshot of order and value is only relevant at that one particular moment. It’ll change again. And again. And again.

The important thing, though, is just to begin. Just start. You can see the detailed steps on how to do it in the appendix. Scrum is designed so that you can boot up a team in a couple of days. Get your Backlog, plan your first Sprint, and away you go. You don’t need to devote a lot of time to planning, reflection, meditations, mission statements, o

And the method to take action, and perhaps what Deming is most famous for, is the PDCA cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Act). You can apply this cycle to the production of just about anything, be it a car, a videogame, or, heck, even a paper airplane.

As I’ve said before, I’m not very interested in individual performance; I’m only interested in team performance. I can double a team’s productivity in a month, but an individual? That could take a year. And a whole bunch of individuals? A whole division? A whole company? That could take forever. So I use transparency to focus on improving the team.

One, the Product Owner needs to be knowledgeable about the domain. By this I mean two things: the Product Owner should understand the process the team is executing well enough to know what can be done and, just as important, what can’t. But the Product Owner also has to understand the what well enough to know how to translate what can be done into