mountain goat software. So it’s understandable that a lot of teams talk instead about “blockers. mountain goat software

 
 So it’s understandable that a lot of teams talk instead about “blockersmountain goat software  Because the horizontal dimension of a story map represents a sequence, it can be read by inserting the word then

Knowing this can be helpful to a team and its. I like to hold the product backlog refinement meetings three days before the end of the current. Without burnout is important. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. You can apply his powerful techniques in any project, agile or otherwise. A sprint goal is created and finalized by the entire Scrum team ( Scrum Master, product owner and developers) during sprint planning, and helps communicate why the sprint is valuable to stakeholders. Led by CST, author and Scrum practitioner Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software helps companies adopt and improve their use of agile processes. com Mountain Goat Software includes a free online Planning Poker tool as part of every Agile Mentors Membership. Or, play Planning Poker online for free. You can contact Mike via e-mail or follow him on Facebook , LinkedIn , YouTube , Threads , and Instagram. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. Check out the current schedule of certified scrum training and agile training by CST and author Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software. Stories, themes, epics, and features are merely terms agile teams use to help simplify some discussions. In a daily scrum, you don’t want to hear only about things blocking progress. Mountain Goat Software popularized Planning Poker® as a way of estimating and is far and away the leading distributor of cards. Sprint plans live in a sprint backlog. com. job stories. Sometimes we need a little help getting the creative juices flowing. User Stories & Story Writing Capture user. As stated in the Agile Manifesto: teams “should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely. Experimentation and Psychological Safety. Daily scrums are typically held in the same location and at the same time each day. Because the horizontal dimension of a story map represents a sequence, it can be read by inserting the word then. Add your favorite exercises and you can easily create a half-day introduction to Scrum. Automated unit tests are wonderful because they give specific data to a programmer—there is a bug and it’s on line 47. ”. User Stories & Story Writing Capture user needs and deliver value. Scrum & Agile Training . . Mountain Goat Software includes a free online Planning Poker tool as part of every Agile Mentors Membership. Blog Topics. by Mike Cohn. The word impediment is a mouthful. Every Mountain Goat Software CST has been vetted for their teaching ability and knowledge by Scrum Alliance, and also personally by Mike Cohn. Fortune 500s, startups and everything in between choose Mike Cohn for their agile and Scrum education and certification. Join Mike Cohn for a FREE user stories webinar, Wednesday November 8th at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Generally re-estimating is useful when you completely blew it on the original estimate and can see that the mistake was a rare occurrence. Supplement it. Overall velocity is higher. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. The word impediment is a mouthful. Membership in AMC is included as a benefit of training with Mountain Goat, but anyone can join AMC and receive access to the Planning Poker tool. Team Discounts for In-Person Public Training* * Discounts only available on U. The horizontal axis of the sprint burndown chart shows the sprints; the vertical axis shows the amount of work remaining at the start of each sprint. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. The primary advantage Kanban has over Scrum is that it is immediately intuitive to anyone. As an in-demand agile and Scrum instructor, I train groups all over the world on how to adopt and succeed with agile software development using the Scrum framework. com . Agile Mentors Podcast. He’s a veteran of applying Scrum and agile principles and practices to help organizations build better products, and ship them on time. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. User Stories & Story Writing Capture user needs and deliver value. Learn agile and Scrum tips and techniques from expert ScrumMaster, educator and author Mike Cohn and. A job story is focused less on the user performing some function than on the job to be done by that story. It is built on certain agile principles, including small, cross-functional teams, frequent inspect-and-adapt feedback loops. There are times when you want to re-estimate. Add your favorite exercises and you can easily create a half-day introduction to Scrum. ” Join Mike Cohn for a FREE user stories webinar, Wednesday November 8th at 10am PT / 1pm ET. The traditional Fibonacci series is 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on. Some of these terms date back to the days of Extreme Programming (XP) teams, but the terms are used in newer ways now. The Certified ScrumMaster (CSM ®) is a two-day class, taught by one of our Certified Scrum Trainers (CST ®). For the user story above to be done, two things must be true. Don’t get me wrong—bad bosses do exist—but from my experience, the above situation happens because of two key factors: Leadership underestimate the actual changes required to be agile, AND. As a product owner, agile product manager, or member of a customer team, you need help identifying user needs and communicating how best to meet those needs. Mike Cohn. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. This keeps the discussion brisk but relevant. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. Mountain goat, (Oreamnos americanus), a stocky North American ruminant of the family Bovidae (order Artiodactyla). Find agile practitioners from multiple industries and experience levels to build a mentoring relationship with. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. The first approach to adding detail is to split the story into multiple sub-stories. User Story Examples. For most teams, it is done immediately before the retrospective. Learn agile and Scrum tips and techniques from expert ScrumMaster, educator and author Mike Cohn and the staff of Mountain Goat Software. Traditional project managers usually take on a great deal of responsibility. 1 Montana State University-Billings [email protected] and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. The technique of expressing requirements as user stories is one of the most broadly applicable techniques introduced by the agile processes. Culture. Kent has a great approach to overtime. On many teams, the product owner will also supply a draft sprint goal, which may be collaboratively revised. That's why we created this simple PDF with over 200 user story examples. Welcome! I'm Mike Cohn, founder of Mountain Goat, Certified Scrum Trainer, and co-founder of Scrum Alliance & Agile Alliance. He is a co-founder and former board member of the Scrum Alliance, and a co-founder of the non. With three books on agile development topics, Mike Cohn is frequently sought after as a speaker, instructor, and agile coach. Live Online Training Live, instructor-led courses. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. Agile project management often puts the traditional project manager in a difficult position. 1) All of the acceptance criteria (conditions of satisfaction) must be fulfilled, and 2) All of the items that make up. User Stories & Story Writing Capture user needs and deliver value. Elements, Categories and Levels. Certified Scrum Training 2-day certification classes. Learn how to master personas, run successful story-writing workshops, split and add details. It's ideal for introducing Scrum to your organization or presenting to a user group. This introduction to Scrum presentation is about 90 minutes, and is fully redistributable. Mike is a founding member of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance and can be reached at hello@mountaingoatsoftware. Definition of Ready: What It Is and Why Its Dangerous. Learn agile and Scrum tips and techniques from expert ScrumMaster, educator and author Mike Cohn and the staff of Mountain Goat Software. As a type of user. It provides a structure to work within and desired outcomes to achieve, but leaves teams room to decide how best to achieve those outcomes in their specific context. Try to keep most estimates, or at least the most important estimates within about one order of magnitude, such as from 1-10. Please also feel free to share the link with any colleagues you think might find it useful. Mike is CEO of Mountain Goat Software, and one of the industry’s most well-respected Certified Scrum Trainers. Mountain Goat Software offers a collection of tools for agile project management based on ideas from Mike Cohn's books. Do one-at-a-time feature reviews for those who requested a feature. Each project success slider starts at a value of three along a continuum from one to five. Delivery. Mike Cohn. Planning Poker® Cards. When played in person, these values are printed on cards and held by each estimator, giving Planning Poker its name. Certified Scrum Training 2-day certification classes. So it’s understandable that a lot of teams talk instead about “blockers. Why Train with Mountain Goat Software? Mountain Goat Software has trained more than 45,000 agile professionals in certified classes, trained 100s of teams in private training,. Planning Poker is a powerful and fun way to improve planning and estimation ceremonies for remote and in-person teams. All classes are led by Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat Software – a leading choice in agile training and Scrum certification for Fortune 500s, startups and everything in between. Recognized as one of the top agile consulting and training firms, Mountain Goat Software serves a diverse group of clients in a variety of environments, including financial. Suppose you get in the office elevator, push the button to go to your floor and your boss’s boss—not your boss, but your boss’s boss—comes running up to the elevator and yells, “Hold the elevator!”user stories. Learn more about available dates - click here . A user can limit who can see her résumé. Scrum & Agile Training . ) Second, you should re-estimate when there has been a change in. Scrum & Agile Training. Story points serve much the same purpose. Start by selecting up to four prioritization criteria and enter these as columns on the table below. Ever few weeks (typically two to four), teams deliver a fully functional chunk of work (an increment). Mountain Goat Software offers several on-demand courses perfect for team training and volume discounts are available. During a sprint planning meeting, Scrum and agile teams accomplish three things: Determine which set of product backlog items the team can commit to complete during the sprint (or iteration). Agile Training for Your Whole Team. It really depends on how the team views the stretch goal. Instantly import stories from your favorite project management. S. 1. Mike Cohn is co-founder of the Scrum Alliance, and founder of Mountain Goat Software. Mike is CEO of Mountain Goat Software, and one of the industry’s most well-respected Certified Scrum Trainers. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. The purpose of project oversight, commonly called. This two-day, live and online course is a chance to prove your value as a specialist with the skills you need to become an exceptional Scrum. Doing code inspections. At Mountain Goat Software there are different options for Mentoring and Coaching. In-Person PDUs and SEUs. Very little has been written to date on how to prioritize and sequence the development of new features and capabilities on an agile software development project. The sprint review meeting is intentionally kept very informal, typically with rules forbidding the use of PowerPoint slides and allowing no more than two hours of preparation time for the meeting. He is the author of Agile Estimating and Planning, User. presentations. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. Bucket backlog items by story size. One example of a company that successfully transitioned all at once is Mountain Goat Software client Salesforce. When it comes to agile and. Scrum & Agile Training . Companies large and small and across all industries have attended his training courses. When it comes to Scrum vs agile or Scrum in agile contexts, it helps to think of agile as an umbrella. Check website However, Mountain Goat Software does offer coupons and. Mountain Goat on YouTube. A concept adapted from Extreme Programming (XP), spikes give teams technical and functional information they need to make decisions about the best approach to certain user stories. With live interactive courses and a mixture of lecture time and frequent breakout rooms to keep you engaged every second you're learning. A user can limit who can see her résumé. Think about the sprint goal this way. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. He is a co-founder and former board member of the Scrum Alliance, and a co-founder of the non-profit. To get started with Planning Poker with your team, you can purchase Planning Poker cards from Mountain Goat Software. Certified Scrum Training 2-day certification classes. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. There are studies that have shown humans are pretty good across one order of magnitude, but beyond that, we are pretty bad. Whether you want to dip in and out, reach out when you. Teams can keep moving, without needing to pause between iterations of work to rest. It requires zero explanation to understand. com . The first is digital artwork of Just Plain Goats (or JPGs). Our cards are the highest quality available but we sell them at a far lower price than others do for two reasons: (1) We buy far larger quantities of cards than others do, which keeps our costs down; and (2) We’re. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. Let Go of Knowing. When the sand runs out, the next round of Planning Poker cards is played. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work. A company can post new job openings. Delivery. Scrum is a framework. Meet the Team. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. Starting out as a developer, Brian worked up through management layers, then transitioned to Scrum Master and then Coach. This Scrum presentation is available in a variety of formats including Apple. Experimentation and Psychological Safety. The 6th principle of the Agile Manifesto reads, “The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is. Or, play Planning Poker online for free. Each Element in the table is color coded to indicate how well the team or organization is doing. Elements of Agile Assessment. Estimating & Planning Create reliable plans and estimates. Each member of the Mountain Goat Software team is dedicated to giving you the best training, resources, and support you need, to succeed with agile. The Scrum resources section includes a Scrum overview with the major terms you’ll encounter every day in Scrum. "), but are rather about an attribute or characteristic of. Then, once the business understands you can be predictable we can address how to improve schedules, if required. Because its purpose is collecting feedback on what was developed, the review is traditionally done at the end of the sprint. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. It’s unique to Mountain Goat Software and it really helps make the course interactive and engaging. (That is, if every estimate is systematically off by half I wouldn't re-estimate. Scrum & Agile Training . 2. A product can be a something physical (the chair). in-person coursesLearn agile and Scrum tips and techniques from expert ScrumMaster, educator and author Mike Cohn and the staff of Mountain Goat Software. This is the actual piece of software or product that can be demoed in an informal way. Mike is a founding member of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance and can be reached at hello@mountaingoatsoftware. An important responsibility in your new role as a Scrum Master is to help. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. To see how, suppose you hop in a river and begin swimming. For example, suppose you’re on a team. This post explains how to use a Definition of Ready successfully and avoid it becoming a first step. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. Mentoring & Coaching Tailored support for agile teams. Whether you are an agile coach, product owner, scrum master, or developer. Mountain Goat Software offers online and in-person training courses and resources to help you succeed with agile and Scrum. To reinforce training, companies often provide opportunities (wikis, informal lunch-and-learns, cross-team exchanges) for teams to share information with each other. After an hour, you measure how far you've traveled, and you are 2. If you’ve ever done agile estimating with story points or used Planning Poker ®, you may have used either the Fibonacci sequence or a modified Fibonacci sequence. Yes! Agile Teams Plan. This unique space is designed for a global community of agile practitioners to question, comment and learn—from one another—how to succeed with agile in the real world. Scrum & Agile Training . For example, I feel stretch goals are like a crushing weight. Relative Weighting. Thoroughly reviewed and eagerly anticipated by the agile community, User Stories Applied offers a requirements process that saves time, eliminates rework, and leads to better software. He or she is told, for example, to make scope/schedule tradeoff. It's ideal for introducing Scrum to your organization or presenting to a user group. Theme screening is a useful and easy prioritization technique that can be used to prioritize themes and/or epics against one another. This introduction to Scrum presentation is about 90 minutes, and is fully redistributable. Overview. Any team might exceed expectations occasionally. Show edited by Rhett Gill. Gratitude is powerful. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. That may involve hiring or moving people onto the project. presentations. About the Author. His practical experience in both waterfall and agile organizations helps him clarify what works. Training. User stories are an effective approach on all time-constrained projects, and are a great way to begin introducing a bit of agility to your projects. 8K subscribers ‧ 121 videos. Teams that feel pressured by time or fear of failure aren't going to feel safe to experiment. The lively Zoom sessions will fly by, we know because that’s the feedback we get from attendees. It isn’t just people who benefit when teams work at a sustainable pace. And that will hamper the team’s ability to be agile. Working on a Scrum Team is a great foundation class for all team members that shows people how to work together successfully using Scrum. Suppose we wish to test a very simple calculator that allows a user to enter two integers, click either a multiply or divide button, and then see the result of that operation. Mountain Goat Software. com. I encourage you, though, to stick with impediment. Published Mar 2004 Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional. com . A product can even just be an idea (a patentable algorithm or the secret to getting more right swipes on Tinder). The primary advantage Kanban has over Scrum is that it is immediately intuitive to anyone. As a type of user. While some refuse to exert any influence on their teams, others rely too much on command-and-control management styles. When it comes to agile and. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. Present Upcoming Product Backlog Items. Mountain Goat Software is delighted to be able to give users a choice of free agile tools that they can use to help with their agile and Scrum projects. You can meet them here: Leadership. His practical experience in both waterfall and agile organizations helps him clarify what works. CSM Certification from Mountain Goat Discover Certified Scrum Master Training. Access to a passionate and curious agile community, including an online forum and monthly lean coffee. Send a screen recording to people who could not participate. As the agile manifesto explains one of the 12 principles of agile project management: "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. These courses also count for continuing education units (SEUs) from the Scrum Alliance, as well as PDUs within the PMI. Like the runners, these two programmers may agree that a given user story is 5 points (rather than 5 miles). For Individuals . Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. Scrum teams are often under tremendous pressure to deliver more, faster. Theme screening is a useful and easy prioritization technique that can be used to prioritize themes and/or epics against one another. When a definition of ready includes a rule that something must be done before the next thing can start, it moves the team dangerously close to stage-gate process. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. Story points are a unit of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort that will be required to fully implement a product backlog item or any other piece of work. Learn agile and Scrum tips and techniques from expert ScrumMaster, educator and author Mike Cohn and the staff of Mountain Goat Software. The final product is also measured against the original sprint goals. When it comes to Scrum vs agile or Scrum in agile contexts, it helps to think of agile as an umbrella. With that in mind, we've created this. The unintended side effects of shorter sprints and sprint commitments can be devastating for creativity and breakthroughs. The are two reasons to estimate the sprint backlog. In the absence of psychological safety, innovation recedes. A sprint review meeting should not become a distraction or significant detour for the team; rather, it should be a natural result of the sprint. This is one of those things that needs to be left entirely up to the team. No matter how good a Scrum team is, there is always room to improve. Learn what sprint goals are and. Scrum & Agile Training . Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. User Stories & Story Writing Capture user needs and deliver value. Traditional, sequential approaches to project management are a more natural fit with management’s desire for oversight on projects. Our Working on a Scrum Team course, for example, is modular. With one assigned task, individuals were able to spend approximately 70 percent of each day on that task. Brian is the Senior Vice President of Training and Coaching with Mountain Goat Software and is a Certified Scrum Trainer. I some goal. While we believe all of our agile development training courses will help you get better at being agile, we understand that your training budget and, perhaps more importantly, the time you can commit to training, are limited. My usual recommendation is to assign points to bug fixing the agile defects. Figure 1: Cards are read horizontally by inserting the word then between each card. The next are NFTs that can be exchanged or redeemed. Download Mountain Goat Mountain for iOS to always Be Climbing. Obvious at All Levels. You’ll also find a visual representation of the Scrum cycle, breaking the process into backlogs, sprints, meetings and shippable products. Planning Poker® License Agreement. Development teams often benefit from the focus that a sprint goal provides. Certified Scrum Training 2-day certification classes. As a more generic example of writing user stories in Scrum, these are some typical user stories for a job posting and search site: A user can post her resume to the web site. Join Mike Cohn for Better User Stories, now offered Live Online. How Does Planning Poker Work? At the start of this agile planning exercise, each estimator is given a deck of Planning Poker cards. For Individuals . Overview. User Stories & Story Writing Capture user needs and deliver value. Product backlog refinement—in the past called backlog grooming in reference to keeping the product backlog clean and orderly—is a meeting that is held near the end of one sprint to ensure the backlog is ready for the next sprint. The target user is a vice president of marketing who is trying to figure out how to spend the ad budget. Mike is a founding member of the Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance and can be reached at [email protected] Required. He is the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, Agile Estimating and Planning, and Succeeding with Agile. I’ll start with industry-standard definitions, and I’ll comment on the changes as well. These stories were written in early 2004. Two-day courses are 15 PDUs and 16 SEUs and one-day classes are 7. Join Mike Cohn for a FREE user stories webinar, Wednesday November 8th at 10am PT / 1pm ET. Scrum & Agile Training . Teams that feel pressured by time or fear of failure aren't going to feel safe to experiment. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. Passing score is 74%. Mike Cohn. " This tool will give you new ways to tune and adjust what you and your teams are doing. For details about team coaching and training where experienced trainers can work with you and your team to facilitate a retrospective, or help you write a product backlog page, visit our private training page . Show all tags. In that approach a sprint is planned by selecting product backlog items whose estimates sum to the. This post explains how to use a Definition of Ready successfully and avoid it becoming a first step. By splitting product backlog items into small, discrete tasks and then roughly estimating them during sprint planning, the team is better able to assess the workload. Mountain Goat Mountain is a fast arcade game, where you climb the highest and most treacherous. Scrum & Agile Training . Learn agile and Scrum tips and techniques from expert ScrumMaster, educator and author Mike Cohn and the staff of Mountain Goat Software. coaching. Collaboration. The ScrumMaster should update the release burndown chart at the end of each sprint. Ever few weeks (typically two to four), teams deliver a fully functional chunk of work (an increment). Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. Scrum & Agile Training. Each member of the Mountain Goat Software team is dedicated to giving you the best training, resources, and support you need, to succeed with agile. A great way to build software that meets users’ needs is to begin with “user stories. User Stories & Story Writing Capture user needs and deliver value. 3. He is a co-founder and former board member of the Scrum Alliance, and a co-founder of the non-profit. This makes them the perfect couple’s or group Halloween costume. User Stories & Story Writing Capture user needs and deliver value. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. Our cards are the highest quality available but we sell them at a far lower price than others do for two reasons: (1) We buy far larger quantities of cards than others do, which keeps our costs down; and (2) We’re. Each project success slider starts at a value of three along a continuum from one to five. . Teams and the business use the feedback from each delivery to determine what to build next, or how to adapt what they've already built. Each member of the Mountain Goat Software team is dedicated to giving you the best training, resources, and support you need, to succeed with agile. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. Find agile practitioners from multiple industries and experience levels to build a mentoring relationship with. Fortunately there are easy fixes. Online and in-person training to help you succeed with agile. User Stories & Story Writing Capture user needs and deliver value. At Mountain Goat Software there are different options for Mentoring and Coaching. Their logic is that the most recent sprint is the single best indicator of how much will be accomplished in the next sprint. Learn how to create strong personal connections with your team members, the power of asking powerful questions to foster collaboration, and how to be more assertive. However, Kanban’s primary. Agile Project Management. Use this presentation to describe the role of user stories in capturing requirements and. " This tool will give you new ways to tune and adjust what you and your teams are doing. User Stories & Story Writing Capture user needs and deliver value. Teams and the business use the feedback from each delivery to determine what to build next, or how to adapt what they've already built. He is a co-founder and former board member of the Scrum Alliance, and a co-founder of the. These example user stories were written to describe several projects and they list everything that the product owner and Scrum team feel should be included in the software they are. Learn agile and Scrum tips and techniques from expert ScrumMaster, educator and author Mike Cohn and. Certified Scrum Training 2-day certification classes. To reinforce training, companies often provide opportunities (wikis, informal lunch-and-learns, cross-team exchanges) for teams to share information with each other. Agile teams plan, and they plan often. He is the author of User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, Agile Estimating and Planning, and Succeeding with Agile. Work remaining can be shown in whatever unit the team prefers -- story points, ideal days, team days and so on. The exam has 50 questions. Learn agile and Scrum tips and techniques from expert ScrumMaster, educator and author Mike Cohn and the staff of Mountain Goat Software. Mike is the author of User Stories Applied for Software Development, Agile Estimating and Planning, and Succeeding with Agile Software. Live, online Scrum certification classes, short-course video training, and free downloadable resources to take your agile team from good to great. Mike Cohn - Mountain Goat Software, Denver, CO. As a more generic example of writing user stories in Scrum, these are some typical user stories for a job posting and search site: A user can post her resume to the web site. A high-performing team does it again and again, without burnout. Brian and Mike talk about why and how to use Story Points in estimating. They highlight the value of establishing relationships with like-minded individuals for both support and greater success. This keeps the discussion brisk but relevant.