I was sitting in a room with a team and observing the team’s Sprint planning. And the ScrumMaster was asking the team to do the story point estimate for a story. And the developer who had been assigned to that story said “5 points”. The SM set the number in…

I started writing articles to share more about my thoughts when I had the idea about the two engines the organisation should build to establish business agility. One of them is enabling the organisation to build products fast so they can learn iteratively with speed. The “speed” means that we…

Individual and Interaction over Process and tool When I asked a manager what I could help them improve, he asked “Can you teach my teams how to use Jira properly?”. Today, Jira is almost the default delivery management tool for an Agile team. …

When I coach teams for Agile practices, I often was asked to help them with backlog refinement. A common issue I found in my observation is the missing conversations. When the PO asks if the item is clear after the brief, in most cases everyone nods their heads quietly (It…

In the early days, when Scrum started to become popular, there was a concept of “3 accelerators”. These accelerators are Ready, Done and Deployed. Ready means the backlog item is ready to be started in the next Sprint. Done means the backlog item has been completed and is releasable to…

“We need to clarify our roles and responsibilities. And maybe we need to create a new role for that”. A manager responded to me when I discussed with her what needs to improve. It happened quite often when I discuss it with other managers in my experience. …

Today if you visit an organization that is trying to adopt Agile practices, you may observe a common pattern: the technique of Scrum of Scrums has been used on all different levels. There is S1 — the team-level daily Scrum, S2 — the Scrum of Scrums on the program or…

Today’s organizations, especially large ones, have established a complicated way to run their business, e.g., many layers, lots of roles, different tools and systems, etc. When they try to reform their model to adapt to the fast-paced and ever-evolving world, this organizational complexity causes difficulties in a successful transformation because…

Last weekend I had a coffee with some new friends after we played basketball together. One of them is a product manager in his organization. When he knew that my job is coaching the team about agile practices, he told me that his organization is also “doing Agile” and he…