Author archives: ralfkruse81
11 June 2013
Author:
Ralf Kruse
Scrum day - 11.-12. June 2013 - Berlin
I am looking forward to have my talk tomorrow at the Scrum-day!
The idea behind my talk arose from the last Scrumday.
There was already the focus on scaling, but the most of the attention was direct to "how it looks like" and "how you should do it", but not so much on WHY doing it.
For me finding the best solution for your organization, your team is highly depending on where you are and where you want to be.
This is the reason why I tried to focus my talk on "Is your organization reaping the possible benefits of ...
6 June 2013
Author:
Ralf Kruse
Let's Play Kanban...
Ralf Kruse
I'm an agile42 coach. Sometimes I'm excited and sometimes I feel more like Marvin ;-)
Follow me @ralfhh
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- 6 June 2013
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kanban
I am looking forward to play the Kanban Pizza Game™ at Limited WIP Society Hamburg.
It’s difficult to teach the principles of Lean and Agile simply by lecturing. People have to experience the principles by themselves to get a feeling for how it all works. By playing the Kanban Pizza Game™, you will enter the Kanban world in an playful way. The game looks simple, but the facilitation has it's pitfalls. :-)
Since we invented the Kanban Pizza Game™ two years ago we played it with various customers and Agile User Groups.Through these experiences we improved the game ...
29 May 2013
Author:
Ralf Kruse
Kanban Pizza Game by agile42 at DARE 2013 on Saturday 15th June - Antwerp Belgium
Get the chance to play with us!
I am happy to announce that Saturday, June 15th I will be at the Lean & Kanban conference DARE 2013 in Antwerp with the Kanban Pizza Game.
Nick Oostvogels, one of the organizers of the conference, describes DARE 2013 as “a conference for those brave souls who want to change the ordinary and take changes. A place to get fresh ideas how to turn your business into a success.”
So I am sure that this is the right place where play to our Kanban Pizza Game ;-)
We invented the Kanban Pizza Game a year ...
23 April 2013
Author:
Ralf Kruse
Every environment is different. Is the practice you want to try going to be helpful in yours?
As agile coaches, we frequently observe and get involved in discussions around practices, methods and tools. Many of these start with someone suggesting "I think we should try …".
Many of these discussions focus directly on the advantages of the specific method. Often, they lack focus on fitness for purpose or context. There are so many things that we could do. Many methods that work amazingly well for others. Is that enough to start trying them too?
We need to decide which method or tool is important and potentially useful for us in our environment, for our specific, current challenges. Discussions ...
3 April 2013
Authors:
Franz Ivancsich
,
Ralf Kruse
,
Dave Sharrock
To the naive, Real Options sounds like salvation but they are a broken and evil concept proven to be wrong and the agile community should not embrace that
Franz Ivancsich
I am a true believer in agile, lean and yoga. Sometimes a prophet, sometimes a pirat.
Ralf Kruse
I'm an agile42 coach. Sometimes I'm excited and sometimes I feel more like Marvin ;-)
Follow me @ralfhh
Dave Sharrock
Agile coach passionate about organizational excellence. Follow me @davesharrock
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- 3 April 2013
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real options
Why I wrote this blogpost
I am an agile coach, but took some curves to get there, because I started my career as an investment banker. This is something I normally do not tell, because I am ashamed of the fact. I studied banking and finance and specialized in structured finance - that is the kind of complicated stuff where you put many derivative vehicles together, so that nobody can tell anymore that you included a premium that is ten times higher than the market average and sell them to naive people with enough money, mainly private banking customers. Another popular ...
22 February 2013
Author:
Ralf Kruse
As agile coaches, we regularly want to create a learning environment for people. We use concepts like Training from the Back of the Room to step aside and let them learn. We facilitate and regularly use games. Playing is an integral and very effective part of learning, as it opens people's minds and hearts and creates the emotional connections that makes experiences stick.
As agile coaches, we regularly want to create a learning environment for people. We use concepts like Training from the Back of the Room to step aside and let them learn. We facilitate and regularly use games. Playing is an integral and very effective part of learning, as it opens people's minds and hearts and creates the emotional connections that makes experiences stick.
What makes learning agile challenging?
We want participants to understand concepts that in our experience increase their chance to be successful in agile transitions, and to learn practical methods that may help their teams as well ...
5 December 2011
Author:
Ralf Kruse
The focus of the 4th lesson was on the product owner side. The preparation and organization of the work on the product is crucial for the success of product development. In small groups the students walked trough the whole process of creating a good vision and preparing & organizing the product backlog.
We started by building a product box to foster the ideas. It brought creativity and fun into this exercise and allowed to establish the foundation for a great vision. Here are some impressions of the product box exercise to build the vision:
From the vision we moved on by highlighting those requirements that represent our product differentiators.
The students then, starting from those requiremetns, created user stories and placed them into the Product Backlog. To structure it we used requirements and Minimal Marketable Features (MMFs). The MMFs are used to build minimal sets of functionality (by grouping together user stories ...
23 November 2011
Author:
Ralf Kruse
In the second lesson I built awareness among the students that a common goal, good communication and teamwork is crucial for the success of a project. Therefore we played the agile42 Scrum Lego City Game.
We formed three teams, who worked together to build a Scrum Lego City.
In fixed timeboxes and with a clear vision, the teams made 3 sprints in order to build the city. They made a Sprint Planning and an estimation but the first sprint was a disaster. A lot of half done User Stories, there where no real integrated results and a lot of wrong assumptions about what was expected.
Why? Because they only worked together as individuals but not together as a team. Everybody was doing what he thought would be best. No right communication and no common understanding ...
24 October 2011
Author:
Ralf Kruse
Software is getting more and more complex and a lot of projects fail. The students experienced this problem simple exercise: The marshmallow challenge. The students had to build a tower out of spaghettis, cover-tape, a string and with a marshmallow on top in a fixed timebox of 18 minutes.
Well, the exercise worked out as expected. Three of four teams had no tower at the end. Pretty comparable to real software projects :-)
What happend?:
I gave them a complex environment with fixed circumstances and rules. Instead of trying and failing fast and often, they discussed nearly until the timebox was over or they added the marshmallow in the last second and the tower broke under the weight.
After also some other interactive sessions like the well known ball point game the students got the message and learned:
- Assumptions lead to wrong results - proof them fast and often
- Build your ...
17 October 2011
Author:
Ralf Kruse
When I studied „Computer Science“, I did not learn much about agile software development, although, according to my curriculum I should have.Now, being an Agile Coach, I like to go back to the roots, helping “Agility” to become a part of the universities topics. My old university, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW), gives me the chance to do so.
As we all know a lot of projects failed in the past for various reason. Agile methods like Scrum seems to help solving that issue and therefore more and more companies start moving in the agile direction. My goal is to give the students an understanding of agile beyond the pure mechanics, so that they are learning the theory as well as real ways to work agile in order to prepare them for the real work environments.
In the lecture we will see and experience well known agile approaches like Scrum and Kanban, get an understanding of their background (Lean ...
