In Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1, I said that real agile approaches require cultural change to focus on flow efficiency, where we watch the flow of the work, not the people doing tasks. Too few organizations can do that. Then I offered three suggestions for teams in any lifecycle in Effective Agility: Three
When agile teams master collaboration, that first agile superpower, they often discover they deliver more features faster. That’s great. However, once the team starts delivering features faster, people ask more of the team. Managers, the product owner—everyone wants more from the team. Worse, those people want more now. Even with collaboration, the team can’t deliver
In Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1, I said that real agile approaches require cultural change to focus on flow efficiency, where we focus on watching the work, not the people. Too few organizations can do that. But teams can change how they work—in any approach. Here are three suggestions to emulate flow efficiency
I continue to work with people who have trouble with their agile approach. They tell me their relative estimation isn’t working for them. They continue to roll over items, from sprint to sprint. They’ve rolled over some items for six months or longer. The people feel demoralized. And the Scrum Masters or agile project managers
I see many teams and team members who say, “Agile stinks. It’s a way to force me to work too fast and not finish anything.” When I ask people what’s happening, they say: We’re doing an agile death march because someone else already told us what we have to do and the date it’s due.
Several of my clients are trying to do the impossible right now—plan their portfolio for an entire year. Or plan their product backlogs for eighteen months or longer. When I ask them how well that’s worked for them in the past, they often say, “Our planning works great. Our execution? Not so well.” That’s my
Daniel Vacanti and Prateek Singh graciously invited* me to be on an episode of Drunk Agile: Episode 37 Johanna Rothman Part Deux More Bigger Aging. (*Invited is their term. I sent them an email, politely demanding they discuss aging. Is it possible to politely demand? I tried. Only they can tell you if I was
(I updated this post in May 2025 to more carefully describe what I mean by collaboration and how that differs from cooperation. I struck through collaboration when I meant cooperation.) A colleague asked mobbing last week on Twitter. Here’s the short answer, including pairing so you can see everything in one place: Swarming has a