In my last post I began to explore the notion of “failure” and how it’s handled within agile teams. Here’s is the final installment of that post. Hope you enjoy it… But is failure embraced? Continuing with my earlier coaching example, I remember not that long ago I was talking to a group of our […]

I was at a conference not that long ago speaking and sharing on various agile topics. As often happens, a young man stopped me to ask a few questions after one of my presentations. We struck up a nice conversation that eventually slipped out into the hotel corridors. We started talking about sprint dynamics within […]

Jeff Sutherland used to characterize gaining Scrum or agile maturity as a team reaching a high-performing (or hyperproductive) state. He shared stories around these teams on his blog and via conference presentations (see references). He’s making the point less today than he was a few years ago, but agile maturity and the inherent results, is still an interesting question.

One of Jeff’s colleagues in 2008-2010 timeframe was Scott Downey. Scott is an experienced agile coach. Here’s the intro to a blog post and paper that he developed in 2008:

Scott Downey, MySpace Agile Coach, has a way of bootstrapping Scrum teams to a high performing state in a company that is about 1/3 waterfall, 1/3 ScrumButt with project managers, and 1/3 pure Scrum with only Scrum roles. Scott consistently takes teams to 240% of the velocity of MySpace waterfall teams in an average of 2.9 days per team member where the team includes the ScrumMaster and Product Owner.