Musings about “Hard-coded” Frameworks

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-14T17:28:20-05:00April 20, 2017|Agility, Change Management, SAFe, Scaled Agile|

A recent discussion on the Scrum Alliance Linkedin group was around Mike Beedle’s claim that “Hard-coded Frameworks are neither Agile or Frameworks” which is clearly aimed primarily at SAFe.I admit to thinking something similar before really getting to know SAFe in depth. Over time I realized SAFe isn’t one size fits all. Far from it.It has many configurations and options. Do we need the Value Stream level? a System Team? at which level? How many ARTs? Component teams or Feature [...]

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Comparing and choosing scaled agile approaches (or not scaling at all? )

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-14T17:28:35-05:00February 27, 2017|Change Management, SAFe, Scaled Agile|

This week I’m in Fort Lauderdale, Florida speaking at the Lean/Agile US conference.The subject of my talk today was “Introduction to Lean/Agile scaling approaches” where talked about why scaling approaches are necessary and when to actually try to de-scale as well as gave a very brief introduction to a couple of the key frameworks we typically use — SAFe, Large Scale Scrum, Spotify’s approach, Connected kanbans. I then finished with some decision criteria questions to ask yourself as you’re starting this journey.Here [...]

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Invitation-Based SAFe Implementation — a SAFe Guidance Article

By Yuval Yeret|2022-12-14T17:29:19-05:00January 9, 2017|Change Management, SAFe, Scaled Agile|

Invitation and Pull-based approaches for implementing agile at scale has been a reoccurring theme in my work, writing and talks in recent years — including my talk at Agile 2016 and this series on my blog.In recent months I was working on a SAFe guidance article on this topic. Richard Knaster as well as Dean Leffingwell & Inbar Oren helped crystallize the guidance and I’m really happy about the end result.One of the key details in the approach I describe is our [...]

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Making Agile Teams work in real life – The quest for Stable Feature Teams?

By Yuval Yeret|2014-08-07T16:28:05-04:00August 7, 2014|Blog, Change Management, Management, Scrum, Teams|

Context This post is inspired by ongoing discussions in the AgileSparks team based on our experience trying to help organizations make agile teams work in real life. It is heavily inspired or can even be called a revision of a post from a couple of years ago on the Lean/Kanban approach to teams. If you look at the Agile Manifesto, you can find "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams" Scrum, the most popular framework for implementing agile [...]

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Agile Journey Map (AgileSparks Way) – The non-Mercator version…

By Yuval Yeret|2014-06-26T17:55:29-04:00June 26, 2014|AgileSparks Way, Change Management|

I was just starting to listen to Senge's Dance of Change where he talks about the Mercator map (I can't comment on the context since I context-switched to thinking about what I'm writing here about... :-) and was thinking that our agile journey map (What we fondly call "The AgileSparks Way") is kind of the Mercator Projection map: This looks very nice, right? So why am I calling it a "Mercator map"? Maybe you've read my post [...]

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How to “restart” your Improvement Journey – A facilitation guide

By Yuval Yeret|2014-06-20T19:35:34-04:00June 20, 2014|Blog, Change Management|

Previously on "The Agile Journey"... So some time ago - maybe months or years - you decided to go for Lean/Agile. You went ahead and started to use Scrum/Kanban to break the waterfall and achieve a more agile operation. These were exciting times. First, that time of making sure you understand what you are trying to achieve, checking out all the options, building the plan. Maybe forming new teams, maybe not. Maybe you went for an evolutionary change or a [...]

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Do Craig Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior really mean we always need to start with a structural change? What do they say about starting with Kanban?

By Yuval Yeret|2014-06-14T08:14:23-04:00June 14, 2014|Blog, Change Management, kanban, Scrum|

I've been following Craig Larman's work for a while now. I find the books he wrote with Bas Vodde on scaling agile to be very insightful and actionable. I recently discovered Craig's "Laws of Organizational Behavior": 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 [...]

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Pull-based Change Management
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Pull-based Change Management

Change Management, Export dec 2022

Pull-based Change Management

By Yuval Yeret|2014-05-27T09:14:04-04:00May 27, 2014|Change Management, Export dec 2022|

A main theme of my work and thoughts recently has been Pull-based change. I noticed that I don't have one place that I can refer people to for my work on this subject. Until I write a book about it, here are some links: Most Recently - Bringing invitations into SAFe™ A series on the blog - See Part 1, 2, 3 Last Year Lean Kanban France 2014 Interview around using Kanban/Pull as an enterprise change management approach Blog post [...]

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Helping with Kanban – Thoughts from reading Helping by Edgar Schein

By Yuval Yeret|2014-03-29T09:31:28-04:00March 29, 2014|Book Reviews, Change Management, kanban|

I recently read Helping: How to Offer, Give, and Receive Help by Edgar Schein (actually I listened to it on Audible and then read it again on kindle to better process/digest). I can highly recommend it if you are interested in ways to become a more helpful consultant, manager, person - one who is able to actually help people/organizations rather than just dispense advice/suggestions. I'm not doing a full review of the book here but there are a couple of [...]

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

By Yuval Yeret|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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Pull-based Change Management

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