As more and more technology teams experience benefits with Agile ways of working, the Agile community and the organizations they serve are looking for the next frontier. Some have branded this as "Business Agility". Others have coined it the "Agile Enterprise". This is reminiscent of the leap from Lean Manufacturing to the "Lean Enterprise" in the 1990’s. A leap that’s still in mid-air with mixed results almost 30 years later.
I’m tired of the F word. I’m tired of hearing about how to spot Agile transformation failures and sad sacks. The problem is there is no avoiding the F word or the J curve, and you may not want to in the long run. The doom and gloom surrounding failed Agile transformations is depressing. Why so glum, chum?
Hiring is the single most important thing you can do. Hiring is the key to awesome outcomes. Hire the best to be the best. Google, Spotify, Netflix, Valve and Zappos all subscribe to these mantras. For these companies, it’s clear they place a huge emphasis on vetting every single person who comes in the door and it doesn’t stop once they get in. A-list companies have no problem attracting A-team candidates even if they’re looking for CEO potential in every hire. What about everyone else?
As the holidays and the year draws to a close, I have much to be thankful for. As I thought about how to best express the gratitude and thanks I felt, I remembered a quote from a client who during a team retrospective committed to always “Fill up someone’s bucket”. Where do I begin with my bucket filling? […]
Within the Agile community there are those who obsessively collect certifications like stamps and those who love to hate on certifications like pariahs. In between, is everyone else trying to figure out why all the fuss. Here’s my personal opinion - certification is necessary but not sufficient. Let’s start peeling back the layers of the certification onion […]
Have you ever felt like the universe was trying to tell you something? No matter which way you turned or what you did, you kept getting the same message everywhere? It all started with a colleague of mine sharing his experience over the weekend attending a virtual conference called The Remote Forever Summit 2018. A free, on-line conference dedicated to sharing experiences and knowledge to improve remote working environments in distributed teams and in organizations.
All Kanban boards start off with the best of intentions. The Kanban system is designed and a board is created with a fresh set of stickies to prime the backlog ready to be pulled through to done. The team eagerly gathers around the board on a regular basis to review the work, share what they’ve done, plan to do and any impediments in their way. But over time, the flow of work items starts to slow and bottleneck. People start missing standups as their curiosity wanes. Those that do show-up seem disinterested and pre-occupied with their device of choice. A general sense of malaise settles in. We’ve entered the Pedestrian Kanban Zone!
Learning is the lifeblood of sustainable change. Continuous learning begets continuous improvement. The day we stop learning is the day we stop improving. Learning opportunities abound for Agile teams. The question is “Do Agile teams want to learn?”. And if they do want to learn, the next question is “Do organizations allow for learning?”
If you were to describe what an Agile Coach means to an organization in a single word, what would that word be? Not what an Agile Coach “is” or “does” but what an Agile coach “enables” or “seeds” for the organization.[…]
In the old days, the size of an organization was directly proportional to the volume of PowerPoint slides and presentations that it created. Fast forward to today and large, successful enterprises like Amazon are realizing the limitations of PowerPoint and other forms of one-way presentation. In fact, Jeff Bezos, the Founder and CEO of Amazon banned PowerPoints from executive meetings. [...]
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