Teams, Coaching & Facilitation
‘Doing Agile’ to ‘Being Agile’ — A Transformation That Is Much-Needed!
Part of the software development team, you might have had a pleasant journey. Working one step at a time, collaborating through the traditional model of development and at the same time, deploying methods and tactics to undertake the agile method, everything seemed perfect, right?
The power of working agreements: How to drive your agile team
Teamwork is such a fundamental part of the human experience that you would think that, after 200,000 years of human evolution, we would have it figured out. Unfortunately, the secret formula for building great agile teams still eludes us, and probably always will, because teams are made up of people—and people are complex and dynamic.
Tips & Tricks
Is Fear a Factor?
It’s pretty trite to say the world is constantly changing. But it’s also true. For any business, basing decisions on outdated information or the wrong information, creates tremendous risk. So, being able to learn continuously at every level and act on that information is critical.
Tips for Effective Product Strategy Reviews
A product strategy, like any other plan, is subject to change. How changeable your strategy is, depends on your product’s life cycle stage. As long as your product hasn’t reached product-market fit, the strategy is usually volatile. Contrast this with a mature product, which tends to have a more stable product strategy. But as the strategy will change, I recommend that you review and adjust it at least once per quarter—as a rule of thumb. Consider increasing the frequency for products that face a significant amount of uncertainty and decrease it for mature and declining products.
Technical Agility
TDD: Purposes and Practices
Test-Driven Development (TDD) is frequently misunderstood in ways that cause needless struggle, delay, and upset.
Misunderstanding and misrepresentation have been painful enough that developers have cried out in frustration, sometimes declaring the whole practice harmful, pointless, or even "dead."
Agile Outside of IT
Make OKRs and Forecasts come alive!
Rigid detailed long-term plans, where progress is tracked based on consumed budgets, are in agile organizations quickly becoming a fading nostalgic memory of the past. They are replaced by forecasts and non-static roadmaps. Gather regularly in front of these visualizations and you will enable learning, sharing and trigger important conversations, resolve dependencies and invite to acts of servant leadership. Make you OKRs and Forecasts come alive!
Designing Stable Agile Marketing Teams
I read this line from Coaching Agile Teams by Lyssa Atkins years ago when I was first beginning my Agile marketing coaching journey. It was one of those moments that makes your brain spark, but you’re not really sure why.
Agile at Scale
Component Teams Create Coupling in Products and Organizations
Many of my clients feel stuck with their component teams. They feel they must implement across the architecture, not through it. That's because the people are organized in component teams.
Leadership and Agile Project Management
Organizational agility is the ability of an enterprise to change direction, realign and succeed in volatile, uncertain business environments. It requires sensing emerging trends and actively listening to customer requests, then acting on this information and making the changes required to position the organization for where it needs to be in the future.
In Case You Missed It
It's Not Just Culture: When Teams Impede Agile Adoption
Cultural norms can hamper successful agile transformation, and organizational culture is the most reported challenge to agile adoption. Many of these habits and customs are started and perpetuated by senior leadership. But that’s often not the only source of resistance to becoming agile.