Mr. Mike – Page 2 – Mike Kuphal's Thoughts

Complicated vs Complex Problem Solving

Do you know the difference between Complicated and Complex problems? Earlier this week I was revisiting one of my absolute favorite books: Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World. Excellent book, I encourage you to consider giving it a look if you are interested in modern scaling teams theory and/or how … Continue reading

Want to make a lasting impact? Focus on bringing people together

Just a little over a year ago, Aaron Orr (J. J. Keller Developer at the time) passed away suddenly. As the anniversary of Aaron’s passing approached, I found myself thinking about Aaron and the times I and others shared with him. Many smiles/laughs and even a few tears for me during this time. One really … Continue reading

Risk, Information, Time and Money–Lean Startup Conn Notes

By far, the session I received the most value from during the morning talks of the Lean Startup conference day 1 agenda was Dan Milstein’s (from HUT 8 Labs) Risk, Information, Time and Money talk. Dan started out by restating the definition of a startup per Eric Ries: “a human institution designed to create a … Continue reading

2013 Lean Startup Conference Livestream

Though I had considered many times attending the Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco (12.9-11, 2013) over the past weeks, I was fortunate enough to find a Green Bay LiveStream host (thanks @rdkhatch for organizing) which allowed me to check out the conference virtually before spending a large amount of money on travel/hotel/etc. I plan … Continue reading

Hello World 2.0

The new MikeKuphal.com is now up and running. After many failed attempts to transfer the content I blogged at mkuphal.wordpress.com via various WordPress tools, I finally broke down and manually copied each post. Side effect of this manual transfer is a lack of comments posted to the original blog posts. I am excited … Continue reading

Red Pill / Blue Pill Scrum

Recently, a colleague sent me a link to a Agile Finland Seminar; Jim Coplien: Ten things that Scrum teams almost always do wrong . The talk is about 2 hours long, stuffed with excellent information, even if Coplien’s presentation style is a bit more laid back than I prefer. In it, he references that he … Continue reading

Agile Planning: Planning Session Timing

Once your team has decided to go forward with Group planning and estimating (and may have even decided to try Planning Poker as a estimation technique), often the next question is: “How much time should I expect a planning session to take?” Best Practice: Time box 1-2 hours of planning per week in Sprint … Continue reading

Agile Planning: Micro-manage… Yourself!

In my last post, I talked about the importance of tracking Remaining Work Hours instead of Completed Hours and some of the reasons why this can work for your team. Because of the relatively short nature of a Sprint (usually 2-4 weeks), one might think it’s not important to update the Remaining Work hours on … Continue reading

Agile Planning: Remaining Work Hours > Completed Work Hours

Teams I Scrum Master do not track completed hours. Remaining work hours are the ticket. That is where the real information is held. This is not an easy transition for the Project Manager in all of us. Even for the team members, many of whom have been asked to track completed work hours for years … Continue reading

Agile Planning: Have To See What You Plan

For both Sprint planning, and Product planning, teams I have been part of have found that being able to see (visually) the backlog is very important. If you are using good old fashion index cards/post-its to record your User Stories and tasks, or using a electronic tool to keep track of them (maybe you have … Continue reading