Publications

Developing technical solutions is hard work. To make things easier, a number of agile practices and frameworks have become popular. They provide structure and guidance to help teams develop their solutions more successfully. However, doing these things well is also hard work. Despite in depth training, books, conferences and certificates, people still struggle to apply these practices well. Jeff Sutherland, co-founder of Scrum estimates that 58% of Scrum implementations fail. Playing simple Essence games can drastically improve your changes of avoiding being in that 58%

The Scaled Agile Framework's recommended approach for prioritisation within the Portfolio is to use Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF), but there are some challenges when trying to run WSJF at the Portfolio level. This series of posts explores those challenges, with this post focusing on what happens when Total Epic Effort is used within WSJF.

This article is intended to people who are interested in successful adoption of methods / ways of working – an area of maybe as much as 50% failures. Guidelines on how teams and organizations are suggested to work have been proposed since we started to develop software. Such guidelines have usually been called methods or lately “ways of working”. Over the years we have had a large number of published methods.

A series of examples and case studies on how people have used the Scrum Essentials cards to benefit their teams and improve how they work.

The page explains how to undertake a User Story splitting workshop in Essence WorkBench. It covers, the what, why and how of the activity.

The page explains how to undertake a Target Goals exercise using Essence WorkBench. It covers, the what, why and how of the activity.

The page explains how to play the Values Spotlight serious game using Essence WorkBench. It covers, the what, why and how of the activity.

Daily Scrum practice is plagued with disfunction in over 50% of "agile" teams. This causes projects to be late, over budget, with unhappy customers. The key to agile coaching is to make the dysfunction clear without being directive so a team can decide for itself how to self-organize towards a shippable increment every sprint that delivers real value.

The way we develop software struggles to keep pace with changes in technology and business. Even with the rise of agile, people still flip-flop from one branded method to another, throwing away the good with the bad and behaving more like religious cultists than like scientists. This article explains why we need to break out of this repetitive dysfunctional behavior, and it introduces Essence, a new way of thinking that promises to free the practices from their method prisons and thus enable true learning organizations.