Agile Complexification Inverter

What do the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays do to your teams tempo and cadence? For most US teams this holiday period from mid November to after the first of January is hectic and disruptive in various ways.  This calls for a Holiday Stratagem.  A trick to allow the team to have some semblance of continuity and flow during these times. The Sontaran Stratagem - Doctor Who To discuss this stratagem let's first define some terms: Tempo - the rate of workdays to calendar days Cadence - the beat of the sprint events to fall upon the same calendar day of the week Sprint duration -  in work days (in this example I'll use 10 work days) Sprint length - the length of calendar days between two sprints (14 days for the example 2 week sprint) What do you value more?  The ability to deliver more work in the short term -or- the ability to predict long term the capability of the team to deliver that work?  Or perhaps something else, like teaching a new te...

A fractal flower pattern I find Scrum practices to be very self-similar at various scales of granularity. For example the Sprint appears to start with a planning sessions. Yet within the flow of a sprinting team the planning sessions actually starts with a Sprint Review and Process Retrospective and only then do we look into the future. So in the big picture, planning starts with review. Just like in the Scrum Standup meeting - the 3 questions - it starts with a review. What did you get done (past tense)? Next, what will you do (future tense)? And last, what impedes your progress (current tense)? The Scrum Standup meeting has a flow of past, future, now. When laid out end to end sprints have a similar pattern: Review & Retro (past), followed by Planning (future), followed by sprinting or doing the work (every day, the now). This self similar pattern can be found in many of the Scrum practices. Practices that mature agile teams use to deliver working tested product increments...