Welcome to EMC Consulting Blogs

It’s always been possible to descope work in the Scrum for Team System template. But the method employed in Version 2.2 whilst functional, was quite fiddly, overly manual and not very “Scrummy”. When building 3.0 we took the opportunity to revamp the way in which it worked and better utilise the power of the Event Service (something you can see ...

In Scrum for Team System 2.x Product Backlog Items (PBI’s) lived a simple life. They had an iteration path, an area path and were linked to Sprint Backlog Items (SBI’s). Confusingly, the more common terminology for SBI’s amongst non TFS users is Sprint Backlog Tasks – or SBT’s – which is why we’ve adopted this terminology for our Version 3.0 ...

As awareness of Kanban grows, people are naturally wanting to learn more about it; especially if they’ve tried Scrum and found it challenging or failed to reap any perceivable benefits from it. At first glance, many people see the basic difference between Scrum & Kanban being that one system has time boxes, and the other does not. Another ...

On Tuesday the 20th of October I'm chairing a panel on Product Owner best practices at the Scrum Gathering in Munich. I'd like to introduce my panel members. I've tried to balance out the consultant and authors with some people who are working with Scrum and Product Ownership issues on a daily basis in a variety of circumstances. So (apart from ...

There has been some small amount of confusion around the Scrum for Team System version numbers, especially with the popularity of the 2010 TFS Beta.   This short post should help clarify things.   Version Latest Release TFS version Next version Expected 1.x 1.2 ...

To support the release of Beta 1 of Scrum for Team System 3.0 for 2010, this is the first in a series of blog posts that will help you prepare for the release of the template and better plan your adoption strategy. Scrum for Team System 3.0 (for TFS 2010) brings with it many changes, many of which work together to produce what I believe is our ...

Scrum for Team System version 2.2 was recently released. The most significant new project management report is the Velocity Report.   The velocity report tracks the historical "burn rate" for a team in such a manner to allow for truly accurate release planning. Throughout this post I'll use the term "Story Points" as ...