“Of course the best solution to the problem of how to effectively drain the swamp is to prevent the swamp from forming in the first place.”

"Baseball team owners think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn't be to buy players but to buy wins and in order to buy wins you need to buy runs."

“We've discovered (as the model predicts) that skipping this stage of learning can lead to problems absorbing and implementing the philosophies and principles of the agile manifesto.”

“They seem to place more value on what has been accomplished for certain rather than what the potential for the future might hold.”

“Ideally it is simply a business decision whether there is enough value to actually warrant shipping.”

“Of course this is all just semantics ... Story, Task, Spike, Backlog Grooming ... what's the big deal? The answer to this lies in the fact that we use words to communicate intent …”

“Rather than worry about whether 'we are agile', teams should primarily be concerned with whether they are providing the business with what it needs …”

It all begins with an idea.

“… they tend to revert back to old, less than desirable ways. For most people this transition of skills to procedural memory takes disciplined, directed effort.”

Keeping the wrong people on the bus has enormous risks …

Just how valuable IS user experience?

With this context, the team is much better equipped to be able to produce solutions appropriate for the target personae and any decisions … can be made in the context of the user and the business value.

“Naomi has often said that the reason is that the team has an innate ability to do two things: prioritize their work and look out for each other.”

Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done.

“Asking 'why' is perhaps the most valuable of all questions both in life and software development / product management.”

Flip-flop? Or just new information deserves re-evaluation?

“… have generally missed the mark by NOT actually off-shoring development ... just off-shoring some element of the development process; usually testing.”

“Practicing iterative/incremental development in a distributed environment requires modifications to some of the basic agile techniques.”

In the end, it's the experienced teams and card players that are able to raise their stakes and their games as they are able to continually adjust their plans mid-play.