Author Archives: Gopinath

Book Review: Scrum Insights for Practitioners by Hiren Doshi

The Scrum framework as described in Scrum Guide (available for free at ScrumGuides.org)  by its creators Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland is apparently simple, lightweight and minimally prescriptive in terms of rules, people roles and artifacts. It is rather easy … Continue reading

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Book Review: Scaling Up by Verne Harnish and the team at Gazelles

There are 3 main challenges in scaling up a business once you get past the start up stage: 1) Growing the capabilities of the leadership team 2) Installing a scalable infrastructure to manage the complexities that keep increasing with growth … Continue reading

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Book Review: The Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald G. Reinertsen

Traditional product development approach does not work well in a complex, uncertain and volatile business environment. The tendency to increase the efficiency of each step in the development process by working with big batch sizes of work items (specifications, design, … Continue reading

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3 Pillars of a Retrospective

In my previous blog post, I made an appeal to treat retrospectives as sacrosanct and not to skip them. Here I will discuss the 3 Pillars of Retrospectives i.e. the critical success factors without which retrospectives will not be effective … Continue reading

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Retrospectives are Sacrosanct ! Don’t Skip Them !

“Practice makes a man perfect“. “Persistence is the key to success“. “Through practice even an idiot can become wiser“. These are all great sayings ! Sadly they don’t hold good if you are practicing or persisting with a wrong thing. … Continue reading

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Book Review – When Teams Collide

International teams are now a reality in multinational organizations. In this book, Richard D. Lewis, an internationally known cross-cultural consultant and trainer provides guidelines on how to  successfully assemble, manage and strengthen international teams. He  discusses the following 11 skills … Continue reading

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Book Review – Disciplined Agile Delivery

Success of agile methods in small organizations with co-located teams is well-known. But scaling Agile to an enterprise level is a different ball game. It requires a more rigorous  approach than many of the popular agile methodologies .  The rigor … Continue reading

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Book Review: Interpreting the CMMI – A Process Improvement Approach

Perhaps no other process improvement framework has ever been so  misinterpreted and misused by the IT industry as CMMI. The original purpose of  CMMI i.e. process improvement is largely forgotten and the focus of the CMMI  initiatives in most of … Continue reading

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Book Review: The Financial Times Guide to Business Networking

How to exploit the combined power of online and offline networking  for business success is what this book is all about. It has four parts. Part 1 : The Joined Up Approach to Business Networking – what networking is and … Continue reading

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Book Review: Top Business Psychology Models

Business psychology: Studies and theories which help us understand or explain human behavior, emotions and cognitions at work. Business psychology has linkages with other areas like human physiology, spirituality and philosophy which have implications on performance at work. In this  … Continue reading

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