When you start to plan a project where do you start?  Do you open MS Project and start entering tasks?  Do you start building a backlog and apply your favorite Agile planning techniques?  As I mentioned in my Best Scrum-ban-plan Board post, I have been using that board a lot for high level project planning […]

Four years ago, I needed to design a Scrum board to use with my teams.  Teams moved around a lot, so I wanted something I could enlarge and laminate so we could easily roll up the scrum boards and move them.  We also didn’t have to depend on having white boards or cork boards in […]

A few months ago, I decided to embrace reality.  I decided to volunteer for the Community Editorial Board for Project Management Institute (PMI) Agile Community of Practice.   While I have been a member of the PMI for many years, I never pursued my project management certification (PMP).  I work in one of the few industries […]

For the past three months, I have been working closely with one project to improve their production management processes. They were already working with a basic implementation of Agile project management with Scrum, but they reached a stage in the project where they needed to take what they were doing to the next level. The […]

I caught up with an old friend one evening while I was on a business trip in southern California earlier this week.  After spending most of her career in larger companies with mature processes, she had recently joined a company still in the start-up phase.  While she has learned to appreciate that “putting steel in […]

If a process or a product hasn’t been going well for a while, frustration builds and some leaders try to fix it  by looking for solutions from wherever and from whomever they can.  This results in multiple parallel conversations and/or the team chasing after a dozen or more perceived solutions to the problem.  While everyone […]