Uncomfortable Truths About The Agile Industry’s Focus on Vanity vs Outcomes

In this special crossover episode of Mastering Agility and Scaling with Agility, Yuval Yeret joins Jim Sammons and Rick Visotcky to confront the uncomfortable truths about the agile industry. Together, they explore why so much agile work has drifted into activity for activity’s sake and how coaches, trainers, and leaders can realign their work to drive meaningful outcomes. …

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“Transformed”. Yet still the same. An All Too Familiar Agile Story

Picture BuzzCorp (Many of you won’t have to use too much imagination). They’ve invested significant efforts in developing software and products in an agile manner. They formed agile teams (but a deeper look shows those are the existing component/functional teams using agile methods) They manage Features/Stories in JIRA/ADO (but those are the functional slices that …

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Handling scope change during a SAFe Program Increment (PI)

How do we handle Scope Changes in a SAFe Program Increment? 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 Predictability Score? A lot of people somehow get the notion that SAFe advocates for “limiting/controlling …

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A different approach to estimations in SAFe

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 …

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Ba — A sense of togetherness — Amplified by Music

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 …

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