Steve Neiderhauser

How to Reduce Cycle Time

Atlassian writes a post about the benefits of Kanban.

I teach Scrum teams to employ a Kanban board and reduce cycle time. How do you reduce cycle time?

Hire people with multiple skills. Key skill is the ability to learn and adapt... to the team's needs.

Set WIP limits.

Hold the team accountable for making work flow smoothly.

User Story Reference

Jeff Patton provides an excellent quick reference to User Stories.

Jeff's reference shows:

Story Funnel: Concept to Delivery

The cake metaphor. How to split stories.

How to work like Leonardo da Vinci

Learn to Finish

Tim Ottinger writes a great article on how to get things done during a sprint.

Limit Work in Progress because there are multiple benefits associated with completing one user storing and moving to the next.

For example, when you complete stories, the product owner has the option to switch user stories or defer decisions.

15 Surprising Ways to Expand Leadership

Dan Rockwell shares 15 ways to increase your leadership.

Here's one of Dan's suggestions: Write down your ideas. Writing is thinking.

Writing is a great suggestion because it forces you to organize your thoughts and it expands your knowledge on the topic you're writing about.

What is Lean Enterprise

From Barry O'Reilly, great graphic on the workings of the Lean Enterprise.

Benefits of Sprint Goal

Roman Pichler writes a wonderful post about Sprint Goals.

For the sprint, only one goal.

One goal focuses the team. And if the team achieves the sprint goal they are successful, even if they didn't complete all the stories.