Addressing Problems, Caused by AMMS

Tweet Nowadays, for too many organizations, Agile Maturity Metrics (AMM) have become a trusted way to measure improvements of agility at personal (individuals), team and organizational level. However, it is not always apparent to everyone that AMMs are different from Agile Check-Lists (e.g. classic example of Scrum Check list by H. Kniberg) and this can often … Read more

10/13 – LESS TALKS: MEETUP – Working LeSS Brings Great Results (Case Study)

Tweet Tonight -a  great presentation by Malik Graves-Pryor of Natoma Consulting, as he shared how his company leveraged LeSS to achieve  stunning results, while facing challenges and learning lessons. Malik’s Summary At the Thursday October 12, 2017 NYC Large Scale Scrum Meetup, Malik Graves-Pryor shared his company’s LeSS case study, “Web and Mobile Applications Agile Transformation”. He … Read more

What Should Agile Leadership Care About?

Tweet Agile frameworks (e.g. Scrum, Kanban, XP), individuals’ roles & responsibilities, processes & tools, metrics & reporting, burn-up charts, estimation techniques, backlog prioritization, agile engineering practices, agile maturity models etc. – all of them are important attributes of a typical agile transformation.  However, NONE of them are first-degree-of-importance system variables that are responsible for transformation … Read more

Parallel Organization, As a Sushi Roll

Tweet When we ask an experienced scrum master, product owner or developer define a user story, they usually understand that “…every user story must be INVEST-able…(taken from B. Hartman’s post)”. When we further elaborate on the “INVEST” part, we discover that splitting a user story is done vertically (along features), not horizontally (along components e.g. … Read more

You Get What you Ask For: Agile Coaches-“Centaurs”

Tweet If you were a company’s CEO and had a very clear and urgent need to improve your organization, to stay competitive and successful in a marketplace, and therefore, were looking for guide-level senior advisers and coaches, whom you could trust and rely on during your challenging journey, who would you choose:  people on the … Read more

Grassroots of Modern Command & Control Behavior

Tweet Examples of Command & Control behavior can be historically traced back into centuries, to the periods of dictatorship, imperialism, monarchy, feudalism and even further back, to more primitive social systems.  However, for the sake of this discussion, let’s refer only as far back as Industrial Revolution of the last century.  Back then, workforce predominantly … Read more

Bad Choice of Verbs Associated with “Agile”, by EFL People

Tweet These days, almost everyone knows that organizations cannot “do” agile; they can “be” agile.  And today, this contrast is used not just by agile coaches and scrum masters.   Everyone likes building this fancy figure of speech in their daily lexicon: managers, analysts, developers.  Great!!!  Below is a snippet from Wikipedia, defining the word … Read more

Are there better ways to teach?

Whether you are a high school teacher, a college professor or professional training instructor you probably always look for ways to increase value you bring to a classroom and some of the questions you might be asking yourself are:  “how to enrich students’ in-class experience?”, “how to ensure information retention by students?” and “how t … Read more

Applying LeSS Thinking to Basic Scrum

As per Scrum Guide, “…Scrum is a framework for developing and sustaining complex products… It [Scrum] is lightweight, easy to understand and difficult to master”.  The guide talks about basic Scrum, or Scrum by one cross-functional team that works for only one Product Owner, on one single product.  The guide also mentions situations when multiple … Read more

The “R” part of HR

Frequently, HR topics find their way into Agile Communities and almost always become heated discussions. Recently,  and again, one of such topics was raised in the global community of Coaches and Trainers. Truth be told, HR norms and policies are a direct reflection of organizational culture (also, corollary to structure) and very much define human … Read more