To summarize: your agile transformation is stuck. You’ve thought about your why, as in Becoming an Agile Leader, Part 1: Define Your Why. You’ve started to measure possibilities. You have an idea of who you might talk with as in Becoming an Agile Leader, Part 2: Who to Approach. You’ve considered who you need as allies and how to enlist them […]
To summarize: your agile transformation is stuck. You’ve thought about your why, as in Becoming an Agile Leader, Part 1: Define Your Why. You’ve started to measure possibilities. You have an idea of who you might talk with as in Becoming an Agile Leader, Part 2: Who to Approach. Now, how do you create allies so you can unwedge
To summarize: your agile transformation is stuck. You’ve thought about your why, as in Becoming an Agile Leader, Part 1: Define Your Why. You have some idea for measurements. Maybe you’ve even started to measure to capture the data. Now, it’s time to talk to people across the organization. The question is this: Who do you talk
What does it mean to be an agile leader? Here’s what I’ve seen work: The leader recognizes a problem the organization needs to solve. There may be many problems, and the leader extricates one to start. The leader explores options with the people involved. Often, the leader asks this question, “What is the smallest change
If you’re thinking about agile or trying to use it, you probably started with iterations in some form. You tried (and might be still trying) to estimate what you can fit into an iteration. That’s called “pushing” work, where you commit to some number of items of work in advance. And, if you have to
Agile is iterative and incremental development and frequent delivery with cultural change for transparency. What do the words iterative and incremental mean? Iterative means we take a one-piece-at-a-time for creating an entire feature. Iterative approaches manage the technical risk. We learn about the risk as we iterate through the entire feature set. Incremental means we deliver those
I’m doing a Twitter chat November 3 at 4pm Eastern/8pm UK with David Daly. David posted the video of our conversation as prep for the Twitter chat. Today he tweeted this: “How do you optimize for features? That’s flow efficiency.” Yes, I said that. There were several Twitter rants about the use of the word
I started this series writing about the need for coaches in Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 1. I continued in Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 2, talking about the changed role of managers in agile. In this part, let me address the role of senior managers in agile and how coaches might help. For years,
In Coaches, Managers, Collaboration and Agile, Part 1, I wrote about circumstances under which a team might want a coach. It wasn’t an exhaustive list. It had several questions defining when coaches might help the team to become agile, not be cargo cult agile. One of the reasons we might need coaches for a team is because
There was a fascinating Twitter conversation last week when I was busy writing other things. (I also find Twitter to be a difficult-for-me arena to have a conversation. I need more than 140 characters.) The conversation started when Neil Killick tweeted this: orgs need coaches not because “agile is unintuitive”, but because effective sw delivery