-
Inverting Agile Resistance
As an Agile Coach one of the biggest frustrations for me is when people either won’t try something I’m suggesting, or they try it but don’t seem to be able to get the point of it, or actively try to sabotage it. How many times have I heard, “Well, we tried that and it didn’t work.”…
Articles
-
Thoughts on the state of Agile
Every year the State of Agile survey consistently includes the results from over 1000 to as many as 6000 respondents who report their experiences and perceptions of the Agile industry along with the role that Agile plays in their organizations. The survey is very useful for Agile leaders, coaches, thinkers, and developers alike, and it is…
-
Leadership? Followership? What about Membership?
Researching leadership for a book I recently interviewed a Scrum Master who had done their thesis on Integral Leadership. When I asked about their ideas on leadership their immediate reply was, “We don’t talk enough about followership.” They then proceeded to spend the next 40 minutes talking about leadership. In their defense I didn’t ask…
-
A Note on Patterns
Patterns organize implicit knowledge about how people successfully solve recurring problems. Patterns describe solutions that have been successfully applied on numerous occasions; they are not theoretical abstractions created in ivory towers. Christopher Alexander defines a pattern as follows: “Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes…
-
Strategic to Tactical – Breaking down work in an Agile environment based on outcomes
One of the questions I get asked the most is “What do we mean by feature or user story, and what the hell is an Epic???” If you or anyone you work with has had to deal with detangling the jargon around how Agile describes the outcomes or work being done by different levels in…
-
The wisdom of Monty Python
Monty Python gives so much we can use in our transformation strategy! Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not some farcical aquatic ceremony! – Servant Leaders You think you’ve had a hard time? I’ve been chained…
-
The Role of an Agile Coach
“Our team is going Agile,” “where are you on your Agile journey,” and “what is the most important Agile metric,” might be some things you’ve heard or thought about lately. The answers to these and the many other questions or descriptions I’ve heard in my adventures across the enterprise have been at times confusing, at…
-
Why Agile?
Why do we do anything at all? What motivates us to get up in the morning, and come to work? When you think about it, the morning rituals we go through to arrive at a set location at a particular time, with a bunch of other people who feel just like we do (in their…
-
Capacity Planning is not hard!
I had a Scrum Master I was mentoring a while back tell me she was off to a meeting about capacity planning with her Release Train Engineer (it was a SAFe environment) and she was nervous because there was disagreement about how they should handle it, and tensions had begun to rise. I was immediately…
-
Sometimes you have to break the rules
As I mentioned in a previous post, Agile was started by a widespread group of individuals who saw the way things were and weren’t working and began to creatively break the rules to get better results. Of course, Agile has grown in the decades since. It’s started to resemble a detailed set of rules for…