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If agile is anti-documentation, why is there a manifesto?
Agile development is becoming mainstream in IT. But people new to agile often ask about the seemingly thorny area of documentation.
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Would you hire a project manager to plant a tree?
Many great ideas fall on deaf ears. So organisations bring in project managers to make sure we implement good ideas properly. Good project managers define and clarify the idea, break the idea into features and then deploy the features into production. But quite often, people just don’t make use of the shiny new features they…
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Understanding the background to power in a group
To really understand any team, it is important to understand the distribution of power within the group and how that power is exercised.
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Power, politics and readiness for change
Early in my career, I was told that “middle management” are often the main obstacle to progress in an organisation.
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Assessing a team’s readiness to adopt agile practices over coffee
I just finished an article on assessing the likelihood that a team will successfully adopt a change, such as a new process. So this arrtice provides an example of how the approach I discussed might work in practice. Lets say that my client, Jenny, wants to implement “Agile practices” in her organisation. So she buys offers me…
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Rating a team’s readiness for change
I have just written a couple of articles about understanding a team’s existing world. But how does that relate to the likelihood of a new initiative being adopted? How do we actually know if a particular group will accept, adopt and sustain a new way of working? And what can we do to increase the…
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The 7-S framework (+2) for evaluating change readiness
I recently explained the “Arenas of Change” approach that I often use to understand a team and its environment. So I thought it might be a good time to discuss another approach that I often use – the 7-S framework developed by McKinsey Consulting.
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The Arenas of Change for assessing change readiness
To communicate effectively, you should align your message to your audience. And to drive effective change, you should align your change to the drivers and constraints faced by those you are planning to impact. But, as I discuss in a long-winded recent article, that is easier said than done. And unfortunately my solution here is…
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Is change hard because people are stupid?
When I first got involved in projects, I used to get frustrated that people so often did the opposite of what was needed. We would roll out a new tool, and they would go back to manual processing; we would roll out a new process, and they would go back to making errors and causing…
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It may be logical, but does it make sense?
If you have been reading my blog, you have probably heard just about all you want to hear about logic for a while. But I suffer from the opposite problem – Logic-o-philia (not a real word). But a comment on a recent article reminded me that I can be completely logical, and still not get…
James King 