Growing Pains I’ve been helping companies improve their operations for over a decade. A repeating pattern is where a successful company is facing growing pains, affecting its ability to scale to the next level. Some examples of the challenges I’m called in to help with: Losing the Ability to Get Complex Stuff Done You often …
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?
Context OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) have become the latest management framework to suffer the fate of becoming popular too quickly, to the point where in many organizations, OKRs are a theater/charade with little useful substance or benefits. That’s a shame because OKRs have huge potential if used effectively. So let’s go about fixing your …
In this article, I’ll explore the need for and the attributes of an agile business operating system related to Private Equity (PE) portfolio companies. It hopefully helps leaders of such companies and PE professionals focused on the operations side expand their perspective on what “Agile” and “Agility” mean in their world and how they can …
Today, I wanted to share two quick observations about OKRs. Too many teams working on each strategic OKR I encounter many organizations that use OKRs. Too many of them have this crazy matrix where the high-level OKRs — those that aim to achieve the organization’s strategy — map to too many teams/functions in the organization. This creates a need …
The OKR Theater I encounter many organizations that are trying to improve the alignment between strategy and execution with the OKRs framework (Objectives and Key Results). There’s good intent there, but more often than not I see anti-patterns like: OKRs that look more like tasks than strategic objectives — especially by the time they reach working teams OKRs …
In the Kanban Guide for Scrum Teams and the Professional Scrum with Kanban workshop, we introduce 4 key flow metrics that we believe Scrum teams can use to improve their flow: Work in Progress (WIP) The number of work items started but not finished (according to the Scrum Team’s definition of “Workflow”). Note the difference between …
We’ve all seen it. It’s quite an elaborate show with Scrum Masters, Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Secret handshakes, a lot of artifacts, ceremonies, roles. The recent “broadway”-level productions include bigger pictures, more roles, artifacts. It is like visiting the city set in that classic Universal Studio ride. Excellent production value but not really a working …
We’ve all seen it. It’s quite an elaborate show with Scrum Masters, Sprint Planning, Daily Standups, Secret handshakes, a lot of artifacts, ceremonies, roles. The recent “broadway”-level productions include bigger pictures, more roles, artifacts. It is like visiting the city set in that classic Universal Studio ride. Excellent production value but not really a working …
“There’s no predictability/commitment in Agile” Over the years I’ve heard my share of these kinds of statements from various levels of executives: “When my guys run a product development release I really want to know what I will get at the end so I can make business plans accordingly” “In the old days when we …