Most of my clients struggle with their agile transformation. The teams love agile approaches because they can work on their release frequency and technical excellence. The senior managers love the agile promise because they can see how agile approaches help the teams release a more constant flow of value. They can see the benefits of […]
Agile Transformation Secrets, Part 1: Manage for Change If you’re trying to use agile approaches or manage an agile transformation, consider these three mindsets for you, your project, and your organization: Manage for change (this installment). Emphasize collaboration. (I’ll send this in Part 2) Use principles, not practices, so teams can be autonomous and deliver
I recorded a Being Human podcast with Richard Atherton. It’s wide-ranging from thinking about agile approaches as a way to improve organizational flow and what that means for us as humans. I had a blast. I think Richard did, too. He’s a think-before-he-speaks person, and if you watch the video, you can see him thinking.
Many people draw distinctions between people who do management-kind of work and people who do “individual contributor” kind of work. I’ve been asking if they mean individual work or team member work. Sometimes, they do mean individual work. More often, they mean team member. Our culture shapes our language. (And, our language shapes our culture.)
During Agile 2018, Jerry Weinberg died. Shane Hastie and I had already agreed to do a recording of some sort while at the conference. We invited Esther Derby and turned our time into a lovely podcast about Remembering Jerry Weinberg. Yes, I was quite emotional. I’m human. I wrote a post about some of my
One of the problems I see in projects and organizations is when people wish for certainty. Too many agile project managers and Scrum Masters want a known velocity. They don’t realize that velocity is a relative capacity measurement, not a guarantee. Product managers, the people who manage the project portfolio, all seem to want certainty
How Do You Tell Your Agile Story? An agile transformation is a change, a big cultural change. Agile approaches change us as individuals, our teams, and our organizations. That means we can tell stories and help other people see what we learned. We’ve been telling each other stories—around the campfire, across the table, from the
One of my clients has many reasons for wanting an agile transformation. Their old products are at the end of their lives. They need agile approaches so they can get feedback from customers as they develop the new products. They need to deliver to their customers more often. They need to create a mix of
I have a new book in beta, Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver. (The in beta part means that it is in copyediting, and then onto layout and print. It’s a process.) I’m so excited about this book. My three most recent Pragmatic Manager newsletters were about jelled teams: The Case For
We might start to think about agile approaches as a project change. However, if you want to “scale” agile, the entire culture changes. Here is a list of the series and how everything changes the organization’s culture: Defining “Scaling” Agile, Part 1: Creating Cross-Functional Feature Teams. Without feature teams, I don’t see how you can