This morning was a cooler start in the 1000 Islands (in far far far Upstate NY) which meant that there was “River Fog” on the St. Lawrence River and early in the morning, 4:51am ET to be exact, I woke up to the long blast of a freighter out on the River. When there is low visibility, the commercial ships navigating the St. Lawrence Seaway…
How Do We Organize Sprints in Conjunction to Grant Writing? One of the questions that we are frequently asked is how long are our Sprints. The DH Leonard Consulting team comprises both the Marketing & Training Team that runs Agile in Nonprofits and the Writing Team that manages the grant writing support for nonprofits around the United States. Both teams run 1 week Sprints. …
Different kinds of estimation are tricky concepts to grasp when all you’re used to is estimating work in time. Time metrics are simple to organizations, but it isn’t an accurate way of measurement and prediction. One example of a different way to measure a task (we refer to them as stories) is through relative sizing. This looks like labeling a task either small, medium,…
Moving along in the theme of common Agile mistakes, I wanted to address the topic of intentions. If you’ve ever had a child (or been one), it’s easy to picture someone doing something right for the wrong reason or doing something wrong with the right intentions. You might ask “Aidan, how does this apply to Agile and Scrum?” Well, a mistake multiple organizations struggle with…
Measuring Agile Metrics In a previous post, I mentioned isolation as a common mistake that some organizations make when trying to implement Scrum. This week, I’m going to delve into the mysteries of company metrics and the mistakes that arise with them. Metrics are simply the methods we use to measure the world. Time is a metric we are all experienced with, and it…