Agile

Continuous Deployment – Vanity or Transformational Capability?

It often feels like Continuous Deployment has become a bragging right for a technology organization. “We can deploy 13593 times a day.” “A developer can deploy the product on their first day at work.” “Our pets can deploy to production.” Even more often, I encounter organizations that don’t understand the intent behind being able to …

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“Transformed”. Yet still the same. An All To 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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The Future of Agile Roles != The Future of Agility

These are “interesting” times in the Agile/Scrum community. What IS the future of Scrum? Of Agile? Are we in a phase of disillusionment? What IS the path to enlightenment? 

How will we get rid of the “agile theater debt” accumulated through many years of unsustainable growth of Scrum/Agile adoption? 

Specifically, What is the future of Scrum Masters? Agile Coaches?

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

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 …

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The downsides of agile – guest post by Yaki Koren

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 …

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

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 …

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

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 …

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