Change Management

SAFe Invitations — Part 1/3 — Pull-based Change

There’s much to like about SAFe™(The Scaled Agile Framework™). One of those things is how some pro-level facilitation techniques are woven into ceremonies such as the PI Planning and Inspect and Adapt workshops. SAFe™also leverages one of my favorite change management patterns, starting with leaders. Two areas for potential improvement (On top of my earlier …

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

Context This post is inspired by my 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 …

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

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 …

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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?

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 & …

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Pull-based Change Management

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 …

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Helping with Kanban – Thoughts from reading Helping by Edgar Schein

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 …

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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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Pixar Pitch for Kanban – a SANE way towards enterprise agility – my LKUK13 talk

This fall I’ll be talking at DevOpsDaysTLV, LKUK13 (Lean Kanban UK) and LKCE13 (Lean Kanban Central Europe). If you’re interested in my talk for DevOpsDaysTLV about Kanban – a SANE way towards DevOps, check out the prezi. My talk for LKUK13 is called Kanban – a SANE way towards enterprise agility. While it sounds very …

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Starting with Managers Kanban (also called Product Stream Representative Kanban)

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 …

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