Happy New Year!  We hope that your holiday season was spent with family and friends and that you were able to reflect on everything you accomplished in 2021 while planning for an outstanding 2022. As many of you know, I am a football fan and, as such, I spent part of the break watching the...Read More

In Leo Tolstoy’s book, Anna Karenina, he offers this famous quote: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This quote has been applied to many contexts from the obvious familial setting to larger organizations of various shapes, sizes and forms. It’s true that each of these organizations is...Read More

As many want to do in the upper Midwest, I spend part of my summer fishing.  While I live in the “Land of 10,000 Lakes”, one of my favorite fishing trips is to Lake Sakakawea in North Dakota.  The Lake is actually a reservoir created by the damming of the Missouri river.  It is a...Read More

There are a number of great anecdotes and quotes associated with American Football.  From Vince Lombardi, “What the hell is going on out there?” to Dick Butkus, “I only cheat in league games,” to Randy Moss’ “Straight cash, homie!” the characters of the game have provided us with a number of memorable one-liners and stories....Read More

On November 18th, Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber released a new version of the Scrum Guide – the definitive source for Scrum.  While there are a number of people who have done comprehensive reviews of the changes and debated in excruciating detail the meaning behind each of these changes (see this article by Johnannes Geske...Read More

As many of us were forced to do, agilityIRL pivoted from in-person classroom to live, online classes in mid-March.  While our transition to online learning was forced by the pandemic, I’ve learned a lot about the environment, its challenges, and benefits over the past few months.  As a long-time CST used to in-person classroom training,...Read More

One of the concepts that core to achieving agility is “Servant Leadership”.  There are many places that one can read about the concept, its precepts and how it can best be effectively practiced in the modern organization. The purpose of this brief blog post is to simply highlight a recent example of “Servant Leadership” within...Read More

“We have to have people work on multiple teams.” “We can’t afford to have a dedicated Scrum Master.” “Everything is a number one priority—we need it all!” “We have to have a signed document prior to moving forward.” “We have to measure utilization.” I have heard these and several similar statements frequently in my time...Read More

“How do we report status?” “How do I get insight into the product?” These are frequent questions we receive from our clients as they move to an Agile method like Scrum. The short answer to both of these questions is: eliminate status reports and attend the Sprint Review. After all, as the aphorism states, “there’s...Read More

“One of our core values is accountability.” “You are accountable for these results or this project.” Chances are, you’ve heard these phrases before. One of the most popular buzzwords across organizations regardless of domain, size or geography is “accountability.”     What Is Accountability? Given the frequent use of the word and the level of...Read More