OMS Consulting Partners, LLC

Today's posting is from guest blogger Dan Greenberg... I just came from a daily scrum where a team complained about having to create a PowerPoint deck for an upcoming demo to a group that would not include stakeholders. When I asked who the right people to be in the room for a demo would be, they listed two stakeholders whose feedback they really wanted to get. My suggestion: transparency! Write a user story for the creation of the PowerPoint slides required for the “required” demo and include this work in the team’s capacity, potentially knocking other valuable work into a future sprint. Hold a true demo to get the valuable feedback from the real stakeholders in addition to the “required” one. Go to the manager requiring the demo and show them the valuable work that had to be delayed because of the effort to create the PowerPoint deck. Show the two calendar events and be up front about the double booking of the team’s time to hold two demos rather than one. Stress ...

Daniel Pink (renown author of "Drive" - and the surprising truth about what motivates us  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc  where we learned that throwing money at people doesn't help, autonomy, mastery and purpose do)... He has recently shifted his focus to the importance of timing, including a book called "When".  An interesting data/fact/research driven conclusion is that people are highly effected by temporal events like in 'mid life crisis' or running more marathons at 29, 39 or 49 years old are motivated by midpoints and endpoints. Having short sprints in Scrum (say 2 weeks) forces people to focus and prioritize on delivery, not on some unattainable long term obscure vision, but a concrete step in the right direction of accomplishing that vision. Scrum, once again, leverages human strength and has 'built in' to the system behavior that leverages human strength, not human weakness.  The more research emerges about how h...