Public Impediments List !!!

This is essential in Scrum.

Why public? Well, so everyone can see and offer feedback on what are our team's biggest impediments.

Oh, and the list is prioritized. If the priorities are not obvious, then the ScrumMaster breaks ties.

And the real juice is that the SM is making sure the top impediment is always getting worked.

And there never comes a day when there is not a top impediment. (We never become perfect.)

Now, it may also be that the public impediment list reminds the SM (and everyone else around) why the heck we have an expensive person over there *not* doing "real work." (By the way, I think the SM easily pays his board by removing impediments. But you do the math. Of course, that assumes that the company culture does not stifle all the impediment removal efforts -- which has been known to happen.)

The exclamation marks in the title are there to suggest that way too often we find teams without a public impediment list.

Your thoughts?

Technical Debt

Here is a wonderful video by Ward Cunningham about Technical Debt.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqeJFYwnkjE

Thanks to my friend James Collins for finding it on his iPad.

You may want to 'wikipedia' Ward Cunningham, if you don't know him well. There is some irony here, since Cunningham invented the wiki concept (aka wikiwikiweb) and implemented it first, and his c2.com wiki is still considered, by those 'in the know' as the 'mother of all wikis'. It was the first wiki. Wikipedia is now perhaps the best-known wiki, of course. There are many other things worth knowing in re Ward Cunningham.

Jeff Sutherland video: Basics of Scrum

Nice video. 5 minutes. Highly recommended.

Complex adaptive systems. Kind of important.

http://labs.openviewpartners.com/videos/a-few-observations-on-the-structure-and-foundation-of-scrum/