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A post explaining how to do throughput-driven sprint planning using throughput and Service Level Expectation (SLE).

One of the things leaders often say they want most is predictability. Predictability is defined as the consistent repetition of a state, course of action, behavior, or the like, making it possible to know in advance what to expect.

Students and clients ask us “Can Kanban and Scrum work together?” “Of course!” However, what do you mean by “Kanban”?

If there is one trend that has surpassed Agile in our profession over the last five years, I would say DevOps would be a good culprit. As we’ve seen an explosion of tools to implement CI/CD in our Scrum teams, we’ve also seen some of our Agile practices being challenged by this new reality.

Somewhere between the CEO and 1st line management level, "you do Scrum, just get it done, how much money you need, and what kind of people you need."  "It's just another framework." Salespeople were saying, "you're doing Scrum magic and making it faster." Sometimes people don't want to change.

In football, the team that wins is the one that gets the ball in the other team’s goal most times. Not the one that runs the most.

Many thanks to attendees at my PAL-E workshop in London on 26-27 October who reviewed & debugged my change story for "what is organizational agility?"

Just to set the scene, I haven’t figured this out yet. I can tell you my story, in all its ugliness. It’s based on a real story, but it’s changed significantly from reality to protect the innocent. I hope you still find my account useful.

I often wonder about the Trustpilot reviews straight after a workshop. Did I entertain? Did I perform? Were attendees satisfied? Are attendees inspired? It matters. I just think it matters more if the workshop made a difference to the work lives of attendees. I can't take credit. The client does the hard yards.

When working with a flow-based Kanban system there are a few statements that I would suggest most teams should bear in mind.

The legendary Steve Trapps has been talking to me for months about featuring in an interview. So here we are, I finally agreed and we spent 25 minutes talking about me; obviously mainly avoiding being narcissistic.

"You are not doing Scrum." How many times have you heard that? Scrum Police are a legion.

The comparison between Kanban and Scrum obviously comes up often when we're talking to teams, especially in the context of Professional Scrum with Kanban. While they are more similar than many practitioners realize, one key difference is the perspective on Teams. 

In the previous 3 articles I reviewed some of the most important Agile metrics that Dan Vacanti’s ActionableAgile software helps you to get with ease.

In the first part of Getting to 85 – Agile Metrics with ActionableAgile we looked at the Cycle Time Scatterplot created by ActionableAgile software.

In the first part of Getting to 85 – Agile Metrics with ActionableAgile we looked at the Cycle Time Scatterplot as generated by ActionableAgile software. That piece also discussed some ideas the scatter plot could bring about and conversations that potentially might occur.

Scrum and Kanban are a great combination. With this insight more and more Scrum Teams become aware of terms and phrases used in Kanban. Like 'WIP'.

The topic of Agile Metrics inevitably comes up in many situations and conversations. For the Scrum practitioners these somehow are a subset of Velocity and Burn ups and downs. Now, there's a whole world out there, that operates with much reacher vocabulary of metrics. Professional Scrum With Kanban (PSK) by Scrum.org brings that world of fantastic Agile Metrics back to Scrum. In this series of posts I will review those metrics using great software - ActionableAgile, provided by fellow PST, Daniel Vacanti.

This blog post is about what I learned working with my team as a Scrum Master and improved between one year using Professional Scrum with Kanban.

The Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) course has now been out for more than 6 months at Scrum.org. As one of the first few trainers who wanted to teach this course when it came out, I find it is a great way to combine the Scrum framework with Kanban as a strategy to deliver value to your customer.

At one point or another in our lives we have all experienced a long queue, stuck in a car on the motorway, sat on a train waiting for an open platform. My favorite memories stretch back to that line for the lunch at primary school where it was cake and custard day!

Bottom line - Toyota Improvement and Coaching Kata is the perfect partner for flow-based retrospectives.

Bottom line - PSK improves the performance of Scrum teams, but WiP must be optimized for flow and work in progress should not relatively age compared with other in progress items

Bottom line - WiP limits must be applied to improve flow of the delivery of value. It's a key lever to improve the performance of Professional Scrum Teams, and it's required by the Kanban Guide for Scrum.

One of the key Kanban practices is Limiting Work in Progress. If you want to be pedantic, actually what this practice aims for is Reducing and stabilizing Work in Progress. This improves flow, provides predictability, and is actually even more important for creating a pull-based Kanban system than visualizing your workflow using a Kanban board. I worked with several clients that limited their WIP but didn't use Kanban boards. One could argue that maybe this practice deserves to be first in the list of Kanban practices, ahead of Visualization.

Hello great people of the world. Welcome back to Professional Software Delivery with Scrum (PSD) blog series with yours truly. This time we're going talk about how to use Scrum And DevOps. I am interested to discuss this topic because it's quite common I get a question from someone in the agile community, "Should I use Scrum or DevOps?".

I would like to discuss Scrum and XP because I often get a question "When should I use Scrum or XP?" from people in the community.