Connect Agile’s Benefits to your Company’s Priorities
Tailor your Message To Gain Support for your Agile Initiative | Enabling Agility - 0 views
-
-
aying that Agile is “better, faster, cheaper” may not be enough to cause a company to be willing to go through the often-painful process of cultural and process change. You could implement Agile, but you could also try Six Sigma or Lean. Saying that Agile is a general get-better remedy puts it in line with many other get-better methods.
-
f they don’t see a meaningful update from us, at least once a quarter, we’re going to get kicked out of the game. We’ve all acknowledged that as we’ve gotten bigger, our processes have become more cumbersome and now is the time to do something about it. Agile will give us the ability to regain that rapid pace of delivering innovations to market that we were know for in our early days.”
- ...21 more annotations...
Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior - Craig Larman - 0 views
-
"Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior After decades of observation and organizational consulting, here are Larman's Laws of Organizational Behavior. These are observations rather than laws to follow ;) 1. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level manager and "specialist" positions & power structures. 2. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be reduced to redefining or overloading the new terminology to mean basically the same as status quo. 3. As a corollary to (1), any change initiative will be derided as "purist", "theoretical", and "needing pragmatic customization for local concerns" -- which deflects from addressing weaknesses and manager/specialist status quo. 4. Culture follows structure. i.e., if you want to really change culture, you have to start with changing structure, because culture does not really change otherwise. and that's why deep systems of thought such as organizational learning are not very sticky or impactful by themselves, and why systems such as scrum (that have a strong focus on structural change at the start) tend to more quickly impact culture. i discovered that john seddon also observed this: "Attempting to change an organization's culture is a folly, it always fails. Peoples' behavior (the culture) is a product of the system; when you change the system peoples' behavior changes." "
Challenging Why (not if) Scrum Fails | NetObjectives - 0 views
-
I do believe for Scrum to work beyond the team you need more than Scrum
-
what to add to Scrum making it more effective when it won't readily work
-
lack of team agility is not always the major impediment to Enterprise Agility
- ...12 more annotations...
Kanban development oversimplified: a simple explanation of how Kanban adds to the ever-... - 0 views
-
It’s a lot easier to estimate a story that’s small — which can lead to more accurate estimates, and better predictability.
-
It’s easier to plan with smaller stories. With big stories — stories that might take weeks for a developer to implement — it becomes difficult to plan a development time-box — particularly when the iterations are only a couple of weeks. It seems that only a couple stories fit — and there’s often room for half a story — but how do you build half a story? Splitting them into smaller stories makes it easier to plan those time-boxes.
-
Shrinking stories forces earlier elaboration and decision-making. Where product owners could write their stories fairly generally and consider many of the details later, now breaking them down into smaller stories forces more thinking earlier in a planning lifecycle.
- ...36 more annotations...
Creating an Agile Culture to Drive Organizational Change - 1 views
-
It is critical that everyone has the same understanding of, and commitment to, the desired outcome: a business that is reliable through predictable technology processes that deliver business agility. To do this, there needs to be a management commitment to develop a focused, on-going practice around the pursuit of organizational maturity. As part of this, gaps in skills and capabilities should be identified and positive action – training, coaching, process improvement and tools deployment – taken in order to close the gap
-
the work force needs to understand the business drivers for Agility. They need to be challenged to improve their quality, improve their cycle times, to improve the frequency of releases and the value they deliver to the customer. They need to know how these things fit within the bigger picture and why improvement is their responsibility.
-
To change a culture it's important to recognize that every knowledge worker makes decisions and takes actions that affect the performance of the business. The culture in the organization is the reflection of those decisions and actions.
- ...14 more annotations...
Agile PMO Role - 0 views
-
Institute an agile transition team, and have the agile PMO play a significant role on that team. If you are starting on the journey, establishing an agile transition team can be a critical factor in your success. The agile transition team plans and implements the strategy for the organization’s agile transition (using a backlog, iterations, planning meetings, retrospectives and, in general, responding to change) This group monitors and communicates results throughout the organization, and is responsible for removing organizational level impediments. The PMO representative can act as ScrumMaster for the agile transition team. Members should be leaders representing different departments and functions that are impacted by the agile transition. For example, having leaders from development, QA, product development and the PMO is an excellent practice.
-
Establish a “Meta Scrum” that is tasked with mapping projects and features to corporate strategy. As part of optimizing the whole, it is important for there to be a big picture view across products and features. In general, product managers are tasked with defining, prioritizing and communicating the vision and features for their products. When you have a program that encompasses multiple products with multiple product owners and project teams, keeping everything in line with the corporate vision can sometimes be overlooked. Unlike the Scrum of Scrums--which is tactical, i.e. focused on execution--the Meta Scrum is focused on the strategic planning and decisions guiding the program or programs as a whole. Establishing a Meta Scrum with the PMO representative acting as ScrumMaster to plan and facilitate meetings (as well as reporting and tracking decisions and action items) can add significant value in having a program able to rapidly respond to change while staying true to the corporate strategy and objectives.
-
I like using story points to establish the velocity of individual teams. From a program point of view, however, story points are difficult to use across multiple teams. The nut there is that one team’s story point is not equivalent to another team’s story point. To crack that nut, I use agileEVM to “normalize” to standard project management metrics like the Cost Performance Index and the Schedule Performance Index, as well as the Estimate At Complete in integrated dollars. These metrics can be aggregated across teams to establish progress against the plan for the entire program.
- ...1 more annotation...
Permanent Link to Feature Flow - Increasing velocity using Kanban - 1 views
-
team that had some problems getting their process right
-
their velocity was decreasing and spirits were low. Luckily we managed to change our process by changing some basic Scrum practices and replacing some of them with Lean practices, inspired by the new Kanban articles and presentations. Productivity is now higher than ever and we can now focus on what really matters: product quality and customer satisfaction.
-
one major issue: getting things done. The major symptom was the frustration of management and the team with the project. The first 3-week time box (sprint) ending with about 30% (!) of all features still in progress, when, of course, they should all have been done and ready for shipment.
- ...9 more annotations...
How to make a LOT more money using agile - 0 views
-
How to make a LOT more money using agile
-
More frequent releases
-
expectations must be set for releases to be smaller but still have significant marketable value. It also means managing scope for smaller releases so the value can actually be delivered to meet the expectations. If we make the assumption these two pre-requisites can be handled, then we can also assume faster releases are possible. Yes, I know, releasing software is expensive, requires other groups, etc. For now, let’s assume all of those costs are negligible compared to the potential results and see where we end up.
- ...14 more annotations...
Why agile transitions initiatives might fail : Jeffrey Palermo (.com) - 1 views
-
The executive makes a “vendor” or external “coach” responsible for the transition If you have handled the first risk and have defined success and success metrics, you likely will not find a vendor who will base his payment on your metrics. After all, the metrics likely call for less project failure rate, faster response times, etc. You probably can’t measure these things in less than a year if you really want objective metrics and not one optimized for short-term results at the expense of the longer term. A vendor might want: # of people trained % of teams using an “agile” project management tool # of teams with an embedded “agile champion” # of successful iterations It is really easy to accomplish the above metrics and still not make any material change in the organization. I have worked with a client that did something similar to the above. Most of the teams starting using some new Scrummy project management web application for project tracking. They declared that monthly status meetings were now iterations. They declared a member of the team to be the Scrummaster (and sent that person to training). Overall, the same organizational problems persisted. Vendors cannot produce real change in an organization unless the organizations executive leadership alters the culture in a meaningful way.
CIO Perspectives: A Conversation on Agile Transformation, Part 2 - 0 views
-
Part 2
-
The really hard part is around the people transformation - getting developers to work side-by-side with testers and users is a completely foreign concept.
-
The thinking is that IT is mission-critical, so let's not change things without giving it a lot of thought and a lot of consideration
- ...8 more annotations...
Growth Facilitator role on an OpenAgile team | Agile Advice - Working With Agile Method... - 0 views
-
The responsibility of the Growth Facilitator is about more than simply prioritizing New Work goals and tasks. I see the role as contributing to the organizational culture, and helping to build the business in a sustainable way.
-
As Growth Facilitator, I am also responsible for guiding the team toward delivering greater value for our stakeholders. At Berteig Consulting, our stakeholders don’t just include the company’s owners. Our stakeholders include a wide range of groups, including customers, suppliers, employees, and our families, all without whose support nothing we do would be possible. Delivering value to our stakeholders requires that we keep them in mind when we commit to our tasks each week.
-
When I first started, I made goals that were broad, saying for example “to take care of our clients” or “to work at a sustainable pace.”
- ...2 more annotations...
1 - 14 of 14
Showing 20▼ items per page