December 6th-8th: Certified LeSS Practitioner Course With Craig Larman | NYC

Tweet Another Large-Scale Scrum Training (CLP), taught by Craig Larman in NYC, is in the CompuBox. More than thirty people from all-around the globe (North America, South America, Europe) came together for this brain-jelling learning experience! The group consisted of product owners/managers, software engineers, managers and organizational design consultants (scrum masters, coaches and trainers) – … Read more

NYC Salary History Ban – What Does it Mean?

Tweet On October 31-st, 2017, the Mayor of NYC Bill de Blasio signed the new Law, prohibiting companies in New York City from asking, searching or verifying a job applicant’s salary history during the hiring process.  From now on, violation of this law, by any NYC-based employer, will be viewed as an “unlawful discriminatory practice.” … Read more

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

“Who are the Judges?” Who Decides on Who is Gonna Coach?

Tweet Lets kick off this post with the quote from another recent discussion that generated a number of strong comments from experienced professionals: “…as long as companies remain complacent and reliant on outlived staffing/head-hunting approaches, cold-calling techniques, and ineffective HR-screening processes, performed by people that poorly understand the essence of an agile coaching profession, while trying to … 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

05/26-28: Scrum Coaching Retreat | Kiev, Ukraine

2017 Scrum Coaching Retreat in Kiev  is in the books!!!  The event has brought together a few dozens of agile coaches and trainers from nearby and far away. The participants came from different backgrounds and focus areas but due to everyone’s extensive experience in self-organization and self-management, got the show on the road very quickly.  After … Read more