Output Isn’t the Point
Knowledge work productivity is getting cheap. Fast. AI can write the code, draft the document, and generate the plan. The time it takes and the cleverness of the approach are becoming irrelevant. Speed and output volume, the things that used…
Watermelon Status
You do a quick scan of the project status on your way to the next thing. Everything looks green. You move on. You didn’t realize that you just looked at a watermelon status. Green on the outside. Red on the…
Prioritize in a Line, Not Clusters
A team gets handed 12 “top priorities” and then leadership gets frustrated when nothing ships on time. Real prioritization is a 1-to-N ordered list. One thing at the top, one thing second. Nothing shares a slot. The moment you have…
Pressure Is Not a Strategy
I’ve been in more than a few rooms where leadership is frustrated with pace. The team isn’t moving fast enough, deadlines are slipping, and someone decides the fix is to “create urgency.” Sometimes the word “pressure” comes up directly. If…
Remote Teams Still Need Hallways
Since COVID, remote work spread well beyond the offshore team or the one person who relocated. For most teams now, people are remote at least a few days a week. The physical center of the team just… stretched out. This…
Change Needs a Reason
Change doesn’t fail because the idea was bad. It fails because the people being asked to make the change never understood why it was happening. I’ve seen this play out more times than I can count. A leader or team…
The Point of Story Points
Story points are one of those Agile practices that seem simple until people start using them like precision instruments. Then suddenly a “5” becomes a contract, velocity becomes a performance metric, and someone is trying to calculate whether Steve is…
Crystal Methods existed before SAFe
Last week I referenced Alistair Cockburn, and this week I want to go a step further into his work. If you don’t know Alistair, he was representing his Crystal framework at the signing of the Manifesto in Snowbird 2001, and…
Dissecting Principle #6 (and School Buses)
I want to follow up on my Monday post about meditating on the Manifesto by digging into the 6th Principle: “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” Context matters…
Meditate on the Manifesto
For 20+ years, I’ve watched people reduce Agile debates to Scrum-centric thinking, and now often to SAFe-centric thinking. But the real reference point is the Manifesto, not a framework. The 17 signers in Snowbird agreed on 4 Values and 12…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
Kevin E. Schlabach 