Following a discussion I had in a recent class on agile coaching, I said I would create a “Choose your own adventure book.”
I have only done 3 pages but if you are interested then have a look
https://kingsaddress.wordpress.com/
If people like it then I might add some more content but for the moment it only has some comments on the different approaches to agile coaching that Lao Tzu and Confucius recommend.
Running through the speed dating exercise I sometimes do, we tried a variant.
We had a meeting with leaders across several teams that integrates together. So we went through the usual job summary to see if people had a similar focus and understanding of their roles:
[Editors note – this is a long an obscure article that made sense to me and some people I explained it to. If it is not making sense half way through abort rather than continuing … it either makes sense early on or does not make sense at all]
I was running an agile course on how to facilitate good work in agile teams. We had some great discussions about conflict being good and people being unleashed to create value rather than being held back by managers who try to control them to force them to add value.
But then we had a less comfortable conversation. Someone asked what you do with someone who is being a [bad person] in an agile team.
I went through this quick meeting with an agile class recently and I said I would post this for the crew to refer back to.
In agile teams there are a couple of core roles and then the rest depends on the kind of work the team does. But we can give some more clarity than this, as I have previously discussed here.
Even so, the role of the Scrum Master or Product Owner or Tech Lead or even others will vary from project to project and even sprint to sprint.
So I often have people sit down together and actually tell each other what they think they are in the team for. Essentially I get them to go through these questions that I got from a book called “Stand Back and Deliver.”
Card sorting is a simple and useful way to gather feedback on which features people want in a new system, which problems they want solve or generally speaking, what they want.
So I was surprised recently when some business analysts I was working with had not heard of the technique and I thought I would describe it here so they can look at it again.
All you need is something people want and a pile of cards to sort:
I was running a course recently and we were talking about the challenge of scaling “agile.”
Nearly everyone agreed it was really hard and that we needed organisational alignment and support from the top.
But one person disagreed. He asked me if I had seen the following TED talk:
Rory Sutherland: Sweat the small stuff
Continue reading “A different view on scaling agile in your enterprise”
I have been involved in a lot of conversations about the meaning of “business agility” lately and there is a lot of focus on “Reducing our time to value.”
Continue reading “Automation can improve your time to disappointment”
