Capturing requirements in large “non-agile” enterprises seem to follow a common template:

• Business stakeholders are anxious to catch all of their known requirements into the first release.
• Users generate hundreds of detailed requirements that often bear little relationship to the business problems that need to be addressed.
• Most requirements are given the highest priority.
• Requirements are signed off before handed over to design and implementation.
• The requirements represent today’s view, which will most certainly have changed by the time all requirements are implemented.

In Methods & Tools’ latest newsletter Ian Evans shares his experiences on Agile Delivery at British Telecom, where he addresses the problem above as well as other problems related to agile adoption at an enterprise level.

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I don’t remember where I heard this but I still want to share it:

Leadership is about helping people cope with change, while management is about coping with complexity.
Leaders set direction, managers plan and budget.
Leaders align people, managers organize and staff.
Leaders motivate, managers control.

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15 September I will give a breakfast seminar on the subject Lean configuration Management, where I will tell what agile and lean principles can do for CM regarding productivity. Or the other way around I will tell the agile community what CM can do for them.

This means I will continue writing my paper on the same subject. I am also happy to have recruited a co-author, Daniel Karlström, PhD, who will help me improve the academic quality of the paper.

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A familiar atmosphere characterized the fist day of the conference and many good speeches were given. To highlight a few of them:

• Jens Østergaard, Agile Development - gave an introduction to the agile manifesto and Scrum. (Jens was the one who certified me as a scrum master.)
• Jeff Sutherland, Patientkeeper - shared his experiences on hyperproductive and distributed Scrum teams, having team members in USA, Canada and Russia. Jeff Sutherland is a very convincing speaker with high credibility, since he has thorough hands on experience on the subject. He bloody created Scrum!
• Tom Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC - shared his experiences on a Scrum implementation filled with all sorts of obstacles in an organisation full of problems. They have drawn some valuable experiences that he presented in an excellent way.
• Boris Gloger, SPRiNT iT - shared his knowledge and experiences on the subject of Retrospectives.
• Mary Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC - talked about agile contracts and why fixed price contracts should be avoided. I have discussed the same subject in a previous article, so it was very interesting when Mary took the subject even further and shared her knowledge about the Toyota way of doing this.

I will not participate on day 2, which is a full day tutorial on implementing lean principles.

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Jeff Sutherland just posted his view on the three questions of the daily scrum meeting:

• “What did you do yesterday?”
• “What will you do today?”
• “What is blocking progress?”

Why the Three Questions in the Daily Scrum Meeting? - Worth reading!

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