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 …
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 …
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 …
The short version Based on experience helping organizations go agile in the last few years, an emerging attractor for healthier more sustainable results seems to be the “Starting with Managers” pattern. This is a “training wheels” pattern which seeks fastest learning of the managers in the organization what going towards an agile flow feels like …
Paying attention to Management attention I’ve been talking recently about the challenges of keeping sustainable sticky Continuous Improvement programs. An aspect I’ve mentioned but not emphasized enough is the lack of management attention. In this blog post I will focus on why management attention is so important in improvement programs, why is it lacking and …
Disclaimer – I’m a well-known Scrum Sprint Commitment basher. But in the last few weeks especially while processing the Lean Conference Boston Keynote by Steven Spear I have a fresh perspective I wanted to share. There is no improvement without learning One of Spear’s key points was that there is no improvement without learning. There is …
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 …
These days more and more organizations think they are Agile A couple of years ago when you talked to people about agile a common response “why should we”, “it won’t work here”, or “so this is the new fad? What will come next?” Times have changed. And a sign of the fact that agile is …
Followers of the blog might recall an early new year resolution to get more value from I read. Well the new year is with us, but this post is about returning debt from 2011. Toyota Kata is MY 2011 book of the year. It started me on a lot of thinking streaks and opened a …
I had the pleasure to spend the last 2 days in Jurgen Appelo‘s Management 3.0 workshop that we organized. It was lots of fun, very interactive and thought out, and an experience I recommend to any manager trying to stay with the times, whether in an Agile environment or not. BTW Jurgen’s materials are of …