empiricism – Lean Agile Guru

Nov

17

2019

The Snowball Effect

empirical, empirical management, empiricism, snowball effect

Start with a small win. In 'Sales' they call this first small win the 'icebreaker sale'. Toastmasters call their first speech as 'icebreaker speech'. Want to run a mile? Start with first few steps. Want to lose weight? Lose the first pound. Start running; start eating less; start fasting intermittently; start on a keto diet; start sleeping more, etc. Start somewhere and empirically move forward from there. Allow your agile teams and team of agile teams to aim for and achieve small wins ... the icebreakers... These small wins will accumulate... increase rapidly in size, intensity, or importance... this is…

Oct

07

2019

By Clarence Galapon

Empirically Managing an Iteration and the Work Remaining

empirical management, empiricism

I still remember in my days as Civil Engineer, I used the PERT/CPM -- Program Evaluation and Review Technique/ Critical Path Method -- to manage civil engineer projects (used the same technique back when I used to manage IT projects in waterfall way. I wrote extensively about this PERT/CPM in my book, PMP Companion -- available in Amazon). This is where you get to plot a network of activities and duration... and then determine the critical path. See image below for example. Turn that upside down in Scrum. Throw away the duration... and lots of people get disoriented! People will…

Mar

24

2019

By Clarence Galapon

On-track or Off-Track? Part II

Cadence, Demo, empiricism, inspect and adapt, OKR and CFR, Positive Intent, Product Owner, Releasability, Retrospective, roadmap, Show and tell, Show me the money, small batches, Sprint Review

One might ask the following: "Why bother checking? We "know" that we are on track already!" "Can we just keep working and deliver the work when we are done?" "Can we just tell you what tasks we did and have completed?" "May we provide you a PowerPoint deck, screenshots, metric, list of lessons learned from our Spikes, some documentation and toll gate decks?" Good questions! Think about those questions for a few minutes. The thing is, a few errors accumulated everyday/ every sprint/iteration... unchecked... for a whole program increment (PI) spells disaster. Does it make sense to show the incremental…

Sep

30

2018

By Clarence Galapon

Leading By Hindsight

empiricism, leading by hindsight

Agile is based on empirical process control: transparency , inspection and adaptation are the three pillars of empiricism. Empiricism is the mantra for agile practitioners. Leading by hindsight therefore is expected... not leading by foresight. No big-up-front-design needed; plan as you go is expected... observing and adjusting all the time... prioritizing and refining work all the time... adapting accordingly as the need or situation requires. This approach bothers all control-centric project managers... they want to lead by foresight. However, in a dynamic and ever changing environment, picking a design at the highest cone of uncertainty just to be able to…