How to Cultivate T-Shaped Developers?

Scrum Team.  It is a cross-functional group of developers that are able to deliver complete business functionality (“from concept to cash”) to customers in a short time-frame.  The easiest way to make sure that a team is cross-functional is to compose it of developers that are initially multi-skilled and possess both, primary and secondary skills. … Read more

LeSS Talks: Enterprise Scrum, by Mike Beetle (Agile Manifesto Co-Signer)

This was a blasting event, with one of the co-signers of Agile Manifesto: Mike Beedle, being our honorable guest. Mike’s presentation (outlined below) was followed by comprehensive Q&A.  Some folks were wise enough to have Mike hand-sign Agile Manifesto copy 🙂 Summary of Mike’s talk: Enterprise Scrum (ES) goes much further than Technology alone.  ES … Read more

October 18 – LeSS Talks: LeSS PBR Session Simulation, with User Story Mapping

This was another very exciting and highly collaborative Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) meetup session – took place in NYC this week. The meetup group simulated LeSS Overall Product Backlog Refinement session, by a few Feature Teams that collaborated with each other and Product Owner, while using Story Mapping technique. The “Product” in scope was the virtual … Read more

August 30-31st: The 1st Large Scale Scrum Conference in Amsterdam

Tweet The first ever Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) Conference took place on August 30th -31st of 2016.  Budgeted to accommodate around 150 people, it was oversubscribed (around 180). The event took place in the beautiful city of Amsterdam, in the cathedral style audience hall Rode Hoed. What you will find summarized below, are the topics … Read more

August 23 – LeSS Talks: Agile Budgeting & Finances: unveiling conventional management mistakes

Last night’s meetup produced an exceptional turn-out of people. There were some guests from the UK: friends and colleagues. The following key points were covered: Triple Constraint Triangle of Conventional Management Why Agile Community understands Budgeting better than some finance people? Why Management Area is so “untapped” in terms of improvements? Why did Borealis abolish … Read more

Quotes from: Implementing Beyond Budgeting: Unlocking the Performance Potential, by Bjarte Bogsnes

Bjarte Bogsnes (left) has a long international career, both in Finance and HR. He is currently heading up the Beyond Budgeting implementation at Statoil, Scandinavia’s largest company with operations in 36 countries and a turnover of 130 bn USD. On Fortune 500, the company was recently ranked #1 on Social responsibility and #7 on Innovation. Transparency … Read more

July 7-8: Certified Scrum Product Owner Course with ScrumInc

On July 7th and 8th, in New York, there was Certified Scrum Product Owner Course delivered by two co-trainers:  Avi Schenier, representing Jeff Sutherland’s company ScrumInc  and Robin Dymon, CST from Innovel. The class (size of about two scrum teams) was engaged in heated discussions, practical exercises and games.   I had the honor of attending and participating in the course and was … Read more

Managing Performance by Extrinsic “Motivation”

“The idea of a merit rating is alluring. The sound of the words captivates the imagination: pay for what you get; get what you pay for; motivate people to do their best, for their own good. The effect is exactly the opposite of what the words promise.” -Edward Deming, “Out of Crisis” This article took … Read more

SAFe: Market Share Increase. Rapid Growth. What is the recipe?

Tweet IMPORTANT: >>> References (bottom of page) Some time ago, there was a webinar recorded by VersionOne: How to use SAFe® to Deliver Value at Enterprise Scale Q&A Discussion with Dean Leffingwell).   If you fast-forward to about 23 min, 20 seconds into the recording, you will hear the following statement: “…We don’t typically mess with your organizational structure because … Read more