You’ve heard the old adage about the lumberjack who—in order to cut a tree in an hour—will take 45 minutes to sharpen the saw? This old analogy really needs updating: Not many of us are all that familiar with the logging industry.
I like to instead use the metaphor of the chef who sharpens her knives before cooking.
In our Business Driven Development (BDD) course, we use a real example of an online library patron portal. Course participants are provided with a number of (often vague) business rules regarding whether or not a book loan can be renewed. Some have to do with the state of the book (e.g., has another patron requested a “hold” on the book?) and others on the loan, itself (e.g., has this patron already renewed twice?).
Two years ago, we posted an article about the “fuss” around Scaling Agile or Scrum. The fascination hasn’t diminished at all;, in fact, there are more organizations than ever rushing to “scale” Scrum. The reality is most of these organizations are simply not ready to scale Agile or Scrum. How can these organizations scale something that they can’t even define?
At Scrum Day MN 2017 I delivered a talk entitled “Scrum Masters: Why I Did Not Hire You.” As a visual for my slide deck, I created a word cloud by pulling the introductory paragraphs from twenty resumes I had recently reviewed. Interestingly, the largest words in the word cloud included “project”,” projects”, “Project (capital “P”)”, and “management”. Included, but much smaller, were the words “agile”, “scrum”, and “Product”.
