Tag: agile planning

13 December 2017 / Work is Play
Evil Mastermind: for when planning poker becomes unbearable

For when planning poker becomes unbearable. Are people starting to get absent minded during planning poker? Is it hard to stop everyone from speaking at the same time? Object of Play Traditional planning poker follows a quite repetitive setup: Evil planning poker is a great tool to bring fresh energy and focus in your Poker Planning sessions. It uses an idea from the Mastermind Hotseat...

2 September 2015 / Agile & Scrum
The evils of chasing Scrum Velocity…

Sometimes we want more. Sometimes Scrum's Velocity becomes the Holy Grail. And despite a lot of disproving advice, this focus element creeps in with an ease change makers can only be jealous of.       Why is that? Ever noticed the affinity towards numbers when validating something? Our minds are pre-wired to linear thinking.  There's a strong tendency to correlate cause and effect and the assumed predictability of that correlation. Strong tendency?  ...

8 April 2013 / Agile & Scrum
Most common mistakes in scrum ceremonies 3/7: the sprint planning

No acceptance criteria listed on user stories This will keep the team from really committing to the sprint backlog. If they have no clear idea on how to demo a user story, how the product owner will decide whether or not a story is really done, the team will have no way to feel confident about the commitment they are making. This will frustrate the...

25 March 2013 / Agile & Scrum
Most common mistakes in scrum ceremonies 1/7: grooming the backlog

No prioritization Although there is a product backlog that contains almost all the work that can be planned, there is no real prioritization and things get picked up ad hoc, purely based on reactionary prioritization. In most cases this is a symptom of a number of possible underlying diseases. More often than we like to, we see product owners not really equipped for reaching their...

14 December 2012 / Agile & Scrum
Agile planning: the basics explained

There are different ways to build a planning that actually embraces change. The most basic requirements are that this planning is easy to use, fast to change and makes it easy for you to visualize impact of change. It should give you just the necessary amount of information to make decisions about change well founded and fast. Whether you are using story points for your...