Toronto Project Manager – Paul Henman CSM

Yesterday DevAgile.com reported:

The Scrum Alliance announced last year that Scrum creator Ken Schwaber resigned as President and Chair of the Board of Directors. This might be however not the end of the turmoil in the Agile world. Ken Schwaber was replaced October 5 by Mike Cohn, but there are now rumors that he might leave the Scrum Alliance to join the Waterfall Alliance. And this is not the only surprise that might happen soon: other unverified sources mentions that the Waterfall Alliance is also currently negotiating with Jeff Sutherland and Tom Gilb to join its board. [...] Any developer with a little bit of common sense will recognize that it is more sensible to sign contracts for months (years or centuries) of secure work with a traditional waterfall process than to do short weekly iterations where the customer can kill the project at any time. We all know that most of the Agile “adopters” have left Waterfall because Scrum is quicker and trendier to place on PowerPoint slides.

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Equally pointless is trying to predict what task a particular person will be working on twelve months from now, at precisely 3pm.

Today’s Dilbert is yet another that hits too close to home:

How do you identify a high priority task? I like this answer, found on Merlin Mann’s website:


In Scrum we tend to see tasks (the work breakdown that a team deemed necessary in order to deliver a Story or feature) as equal priority because they all need to be completed in order to say we’re Done.

However Scrum also has the concept of a Product Backlog, which is a prioritised list of Stories (or features) which the Product Owner manages; planning for each Sprint (iteration) begins with the Product Owner describing the top priority Stories.

So maybe this card should say “How do you identify a high priority Story? It’s Done.”

It seems that this blog is largely becoming a place where I just re-post Dilbert cartoons, but that’s not my aim … however, Scott Adams is just so spot on sometimes!

I’ve been in the situation (as I’m sure most PMs have) where the team says there’s just not enough time to get everything done, so I try to explain to the Product Owner that we need to cut (i.e. postpone) some functionality or we can’t deliver, only to be told “I need it all or there’s no point in delivering it”. (more…)