…midst of becoming an agile leader asked me recently if I think agile projects should have kickoff meetings. Yes, I do. Becoming agile does not mean we need to throw out everything we've learned over the past 100 or so years of doing project management. Some things—project kickoff meetings included—remain…

…this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian Milner welcomes Certified Scrum Trainer and Mountain Goat colleague Lance Dacy for a breakdown of the four main Scrum events, and why so many teams struggle with them. They tackle one of the most persistent frustrations teams face: the sense that Scrum…

…and challenges awaiting the Agile community in 2024 and the importance of adapting Agile principles to the hyper-competitive world of product development. Overview In this episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian sits down with Lance Dacy to take a deep dive into the anticipated trends and challenges awaiting the…

…is the risk that agile leaders should be paying the closest attention to. AI doesn’t eliminate teams; it increases the need for great ones. The faster a team moves, the more collaboration it requires. The more productive individual contributors become, the more their work needs to be coordinated. And the…

…new episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian welcomes Maarten Dalmijn to discuss the secrets to setting impactful sprint goals, fostering collaboration, and bridging the gap between team objectives and stakeholder expectations for Agile success. Overview In this new episode of the Agile Mentors Podcast, Brian is joined by Maarten…

We say agile teams are self-organizing. But how far does that go? Should team members have the right to vote someone off the team? Since the debut of the Survivor television show back in 1997, this is often referred to by asking if a team has the right to vote…

…right. The Problem with Thinking Harder Neither can your team. No matter how often or stridently team members are told to “think of everything,” they can’t. The good news: They don’t need to. What to Do in Sprint Planning Meetings Instead Instead of attempting the impossible and trying to identify…

…regarding transitioning to the agile process has been to start with a pilot project, learn from it, and then spread agile throughout the organization. This approach is the frequently used Start Small pattern in which an organization selects typically one to three teams (of five to ten people each), gets…

…important skill for every agile team. (Check out this blog for 5 easy ways to split any user story.) Yet I suspect we’ve all struggled with splitting stories at some point. Many of those struggles result from a common set of mistakes. In this post I address five of the…

…is often cited by agile practitioners has always surprised me. The cycle seems incongruous with agile and its antipathy toward upfront planning, upfront design, and the like. The book Just Start: Take Action, Embrace Uncertainty, Create the Future by by Leonard Schlesinger and Charles Kiefer with Paul Brown is about…