Agile

“What should I measure???” is one of the questions I see when I work with people going through an agile transformation. Too often, managers measure people as individuals. (Traditional measurements focus on resource efficiency instead of flow efficiency.) Resource efficiency measures don’t measure what the organization delivers or what prevents the organization from delivering. This measurement question can be the ...

To be an effective Product Owner – and that includes product managers and business analysts who are nominating work for teams to do – you need at least four things. You may well need more than these four but these are common across all teams and domains. 1. Skills and experience There is more to being a Product Owner than ...

If you read my scaling agile series, you can see that becoming an agile organization requires seeing your organization as a system with a culture. You can start with teams, move to programs and the product part of the organization. If you don’t also address the cultural problems of rewards, you won’t continue with your agile transformation. You know why ...

Agile culture is about the ability to change. (You need to know why you want to change, but once you know that, agile cultures promote change.) We (as agile teams and organizations) deliver something to get some feedback and learning. We use that feedback and learning about what we just did to challenge our assumptions and experiment with our next ...

Introduction to an Agile Transformation series… I’ve seen several agile transformation challenges. Since I want to address those challenges, this is a series of posts about agile transformation. The  problems I’m planning to address are: Understanding why agile, why now Change and why we might not be so facile with change and how that challenges a transformation How to see ...

Whether your team is agile or not, whether you envision to build a great agile team, taking baby steps towards that or have no idea what this is, we discovered an awesome tool that will help you manage and build culture in your team. Initially created to bridge the gap of agile methodologies and distributed teams (aka co-located, remote offices ...

Last week I was in Holland helping a client with their agile adoption and digital transformation. When the subject of teams came up I started talking about Minimally Viable Teams. Yesterday I found myself writing an e-mail to the client expanding on the idea. And it seemed to me that the e-mail – or an edited version – was worth ...

Sprints, by definition, are a timebox. You’re supposed to say, “Pencils down!” at the end of the sprint, show your work and reflect. One of the big problems with new-to-agile teams is their inability to finish work inside a sprint. Each team is unique. However, I’ve seen these causes most often: Team members multitask, so they don’t finish their work ...

A colleague asked my opinion on the various teambuilding activities she was considering for a new-to-agile team, to help them get to know each other and work together. All the activities she considered were simulations of various kinds. I suggested she reconsider the simulations and focus on the work to help people learn to work together. I’m not against teambuilding. ...