Like Gnats Against a Screen Door
Among other businesses, I own a retail store in Los Angeles. Though I’m thrilled to have lines of customers at our checkout counter ever day, it amazes me when our front desk people, who are supposed to greet people and help them purchase our services and products, continue...
Estimates Aren’t Dead
Yesterday, at a high-level executive meeting, one of the participants said , “I can’t evaluate that if I don’t know the team’s velocity and the points for that story.” Wow. How times have changed. I didn’t even know the executive had ever heard...
Pascal’s Wager
Whether or not to profess allegiance to Agile is a bit like Pascal’s Wager (Blaise Pascal, 1623-1662). Since objective proof is as hard to come by for Agile as it is for God, you’re ultimately better off saying you believe than stating otherwise. The analysis looks a ...
Check, Checkpoint
I was on a short project recently that had to move quickly, so early on, we decided to whiteboard out our activities for the day at 9am, then checkpoint on our progress for ten minutes at noon, then again 5 pm. Guess what happened? When noon and 5 rolled around each day, one group or […]
The Mobile Army
Nietzsche (1844-1900) said ‘truth is a mobile army of metaphors’. He said a lot of other things, of course, not worth mentioning here. But it’s that one quote that came most often to mind during my visit to the Agile Alliance 2013 in Nashville recently. From session to session, lunch conversation to bar stool banter, the […]
The New Pseudo Science
The Viennese philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994) is remembered for calling Marx and Freud to the carpet for what he called ‘pseudo science’, criticizing their theories for avoiding ‘falsification’ or testing that would render them incorrect. Popper felt ‘real science’, on the other hand, was always open to falsification. For example, Einstein was open to being […]
Catch Someone
