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 …
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 …
Revolution outside Evolution inside may be just what the doctor ordered for the impatient Israeli change leader.
To Team or not to Team? If you look at the definition of Kanban or Lean, you wouldn’t find teams anywhere there. If you look at the Agile Manifesto, you can find “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams” Scrum is quite clear about the topic (Quoting the Scrum Guide 2011) “Scrum …
Background Scrum teams often finish sprints out of breath, out of quality, and out of joy. You also see teams that start the sprint full of numbing fear, set a low bar and that low bar becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Add to that Product Owners, Scrum Masters and managers all spending precious time worrying about …
Some of us have the luxury of designing processes for greenfield systems meaning there is no history/legacy to deal with. Typically though, we are dealing with Brownfield/Legacy systems – This usually means there is some work in the system already, there are outstanding commitments, and some existing queues between steps in our processes. I’m working …
I was invited to speak in two Lean Kanban conferences taking place in Europe this fall. I’m very excited about both those conferences. The speakers list is still not closed, but is very interesting on both of them, and it will also be an opportunity to hear case studies from the local region and meet …
Impressions Keynotes – The Keynote by Chet Richards was AMAZING. He is a great speaker, and his content was just right for opening the LSSC conference. He had tough competition with David Snowden talking about Complexity, so instead of chosing the best keynote, I’m mainly glad we could enjoy both. Snowden’s keynote was tougher to digest, …
Its early wednesday, I’m at Long Beach for LSSC11 – the main US conference for the Lean Software Systems Consortium also at LimitedWIPSociety.org – the community practicing and leading Lean and Kanban in software development. The main conference starts this morning and my talk is this afternoon, but so much has happened already, I’m really glad …