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The Future of Agile Roles != The Future of Agility

By |2023-01-26T09:28:31-05:00January 26, 2023|Agile, Current Events, SAFe, Scrum|

The story of Capital One laying off hundreds of people in Agile roles is making the rounds. I have no direct connection to Capital One, so I can't comment about what's going on there.  What I can share is for years now, I've been coaching companies and leaders to see the Scrum Master and similar roles like the SAFe RTE as accountabilities relevant leaders take on (it can be formal managers/leaders or natural leaders from within teams that are passionate [...]

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Handling scope change during a SAFe Program Increment (PI)

By |2022-12-14T17:20:10-05:00May 4, 2021|Agile, SAFe|

How do we handle Scope Changes in a SAFe Program Increment?A question about handling scope changes in SAFe was posed recently on a forum I’m participating in (The SAFe Community Forum). This is a question posed regularly in training and on ARTs I’m coaching so I thought I’d provide my thoughts here.How do you handle a scope change in a program increment? Specifically when it comes to switching one feature for another? And what’s the impact on PI Objectives and [...]

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A different approach to estimations in SAFe

By |2022-12-14T17:24:24-05:00October 24, 2018|Agile, Scaled Agile|

SAFe™ (The Scaled Agile Framework) uses Story Points throughout the various levels as its estimation currency. This is covered in the “Story” article on the SAFe site. This is a pretty standard practice in organizations scaling agile these days. If you dive a bit deeper into how this is done in SAFe you will see that actually the story points used in SAFe are quite similar to “Ideal Developer Day” as this helps the teams align to a common baseline [...]

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Ba — A sense of togetherness — Amplified by Music

By |2022-12-14T17:27:29-05:00May 20, 2017|Agile|

When teaching SAFe (The Scaled Agile Framework) we talk about “Ba” — the sense of togetherness and connectedness that amplifies the performance of teams and larger groups (e.g. Agile Release Trains).This week when visiting Leankit (To teach an Implementing SAFe 4.0 SPC4 class to their Customer Success coaching team) I had the opportunity to see their Sweep ceremonies (Sweep ~= Program Increment) — a Demo and Business Context event for the whole company.The sense of “Ba” — people having fun together, enjoying their week together, working [...]

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Sensing and increasing manager engagement during an agile change initiative – guest post by Yaki Koren

By |2013-12-06T09:05:53-05:00December 6, 2013|Agile, Change Management, Guest Posts, kanban, Management|

Earlier this week I published a guest post about how managers need to change if they want agile to succeed by Yaki Koren. Some blog/twitter followers asked for elaboration and Yaki was gracious enough to comply. I suspect the fact that this is a really hot topic for him this week helped. Without further a due, here is Yaki with some explanations of what the coaching team in his organization does to sense and increase manager engagement in order to [...]

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The downsides of agile – guest post by Yaki Koren

By |2013-12-02T16:19:41-05:00December 2, 2013|Agile, Change Management, Guest Posts, Management|

This is a guest post by Yaki Koren who is the lead coach in one of AgileSparks's clients - Amdocs Delivery who are going through a very interesting transformation leveraging the Kanban Method, crossing the chasm techniques as well as several key agile practices. It is also where I spend a considerable slice of my time the last year trying to help make this happen. And now - here is Yaki...   Last May I gave a talk at Agile [...]

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Explaining MVPs, MVFs, MMFs via the Lean/Agile Requirements Dinosaur

By |2012-12-30T21:53:46-05:00December 30, 2012|Agile, Lean Startup, Product Ownership|

In the last few weeks I've been using a new visualization that people find useful for understanding the relationship between the various Lean/Agile requirement containers. Some people call the full model a dinosaur. Others are reminded of the snake who ate an elephant from "The Little Prince". (I'm sure there is a good connection to elephant carpaccio somewhere in here ...)     The first step is to understand that for a new product there is a unique value proposition [...]

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Explaining MVPs, MVFs, MMFs via the Lean/Agile Requirements Dinosaur

By |2022-12-03T20:02:21-05:00December 30, 2012|Agile, Product Ownership, Scrum|

I’ve been using a visualization that people find useful for understanding the relationship between the various Lean/Agile requirement containers. Some people call the full model a dinosaur. Others are reminded of the snake who ate an elephant from “The Little Prince”. (I’m sure there is a good connection to elephant carpaccio somewhere in here …) The first step is to understand that for a new product there is a unique value proposition hypothesis. This is the area where your product/service will [...]

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Why Agile Testing

By |2012-07-22T17:19:58-04:00July 22, 2012|Agile Testing|

Background I recently had a couple of weeks with a few activities related to "Agile Testing". "Agile Testing" for those not familiar with it is the name we give to the set of thinking guidelines, principles and practices that help run the testing aspects of product development/maintenance in a more effective way under an Agile delivery approach. A question that came up while presenting the concepts today at a client was "What's broken? Why do we need this?". While my [...]

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How does the performance objectives process change in a Lean/Agile world?

By |2012-01-26T14:37:29-05:00January 26, 2012|Agile, Management|

Seems like every January I get questions from HR leaders in organizations I'm working with that go something like this - "We are working on the yearly performance objectives process, and we were wondering whether it needs to change in an agile environment?" The main evolution I see in the Performance management process is leaning towards measuring up and across as well as focusing on capabilities improvement rather than a set of concrete product deliverables specified up front. Measuring up [...]

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