Matt Seul's Pile of Thoughts, Bells, Whistles, at Least One Violin.

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  • On Co-Location

    Having worked in a few distributed teams my experience has been that  with large disparate time zones, with people either getting up very early or having to stay in very late, working together can be very painful. From my perspective working on complex, emergent solutions that require a lot of communication and free expression being…

  • Breaking News: Team Members are Humans.

    Introduction I’ve recently attended an instance of a virtual training course on interviewing job candidates. While the course and trainer were great – make no mistake here! – there was one thing that made go ballistic. While portaying the benefits of the specific interviewing approach, about 5 slides in, the “Utilization Rate” was named as one…

  • Opinion: What Makes a Scrum Master an Effective One?

    Introduction I’ve recently been asked: “Would you have any pointers to any internal or external information you recommend on guiding/teaching scrum masters on how to be an effective one?” This very straightforward question actually has a complex answer. The main cause for this is that the role of the Scrum Master is, intentionally, not something…

  • On Project Success – Why Traditional KPIs are not enough

    Schism Something is amiss in Project Management Land and it’s not the usual “Traditional PM vs. Agile PM” squabble. It’s a lot more fundamental as it goes to the core of every project: The measure of success. This is different from the question of goal attainment, a topic which in my opinion has been examined…

  • Agile Performance Measurement

    The Problem of Measurement As more and more projects shift to the Agile methodology more focus is put on the entire team’s performance and delivery. This in turn means it does no longer matter if you as an individual have completed all your assigned tasks if the team as a whole has failed to succeed.…

  • One Team – One Mission

    “Gotta Keep ’em Separated”…. really? So here you are, setting up your new project. And what do you need? A couple of Devs and then some people doing QA? Right? Wrong.  In past many software projects have separated development and QA or “testing” duties into different teams. This trend has been changing over the last…

  • On Magic Estimations

    Introduction What if you could estimate about 40 Stories in just 10 minutes? “Impossible!” you say? Well then – read on! What are estimations really? They are an attempt to guess what the future will bring based on a multitude of factors such as experience, hard data, gut feelings and the likes. Estimations are also…

  • Ready-to-Sprint!

    Introduction In the past we treated Stories mostly like a rough idea with more details to follow as needed. Scrum states that you do not waste time on unnecessary detail and documentation. So this handling fits right? Wrong. A lot of people understand the lowered volume of documentation in Scrum as “do no documentation at…

  • Why Traditional Prioritization is Evil

    Have you ever had a conversation like this: „These are your five top priority items.“ – „Which one is the most important one?“ “All of them.” Or something like this: “We have to set the priority to High – all Medium or Low items will most likely not make it anyway.” If so you’ve likely…

  • Scrumerfall (or: You’re Problably Still in Waterfall)

    The transition from classical project management and development to Agile & Scrum can be quite drastic, turning the way work is done on it’s head (TDD) or even doing away with some things altogether (long isolated phases). A lot of teams struggle through the transition – especially while working with legacy code that did not…

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