Make Agile Work Well – From Agile Theater to Real Agility

Are Your Agile Ways of Working Causing Frustration and Friction?

Imagine tweaking your approach to agility, which will bring a bit of flow, improved outcomes, and even joy.

Where its less about Agile Theater and more about agile behaviors that make sense in the context. It might not be easier, but it will feel right.

My Approach To Fixing Agility

I’ve been helping people level up their agility for over a decade. Each context is different, but typical results include improved ability to deliver/innovate, improved time to market, reduced delivery risk, simplified processes, fewer frustrations, and faster time to value.

I approach fixing agile with agility—meaning we’ll work iteratively, co-create the tweaks/interventions with the people involved in them, and use evidence to guide the next steps.

While there are common antipatterns and valuable patterns, Each organization is unique. Fixing your agility is context-specific and can take multiple forms:

  • Strategic discovery/thinking workshop with leaders to explore current state and context, options, and align on high-level fixes
  • High-quality principles-focused training to reinforce missing/weak agile concepts
  • Capability/Maturity Assessment and co-creating a set of recommendations with a group of interested champions
  • Using Flow/Kanban to reinforce lean/agile principles and move away from mechanical agile
  • Working hands-on with specific teams, groups, and leaders to help build the right practices and reinforce principles

Regardless of the form, the overall goal is to build a leadership capability in your organization that will be responsible for the continued learning and evolution of your way of working, aligning with agile principles and mindset. 

Let's Explore How To Fix Your Agility

Want a specific fix? I offer 1 Agile Tweak. This is a pragmatic, outcome-oriented minimum viable coaching engagement comprised of some preparation work we will collaborate on and a 45-minute 1:1 live tweak session.

Get 1 Agile Tweak
  • Transformation or Bling? What My Apple Watch Taught Me About Agile, OKRs, and Real Change

    When Vered and I got married, my father-in-law gave me a very nice watch as a wedding gift. I didn’t wear a watch that often at the time. I wore the watch, but it didn’t transform me. It provided the service of telling the time, but even back in 2004, we had phones that had…

  • How To Evade Coordination Tax By Organizing Around Outcomes

    Picture this: you’ve a breakthrough strategic initiative tied to one of your company-level goals that impacts 10 teams across two product groups, as well as your GTM organization. These are all busy, overloaded teams. Those same 10 teams are also juggling five other initiatives. And the business-as-usual whirlwind. You pull this work into the backlogs/roadmaps…

  • The Value Of The Feature Factory

    Back in 2006, calling my product delivery organization a factory would have been a compliment. We were struggling to deliver predictably. Quality was such a big issue that I joked about asking one of our QA engineers to take a vacation during our final hardening week so that we would have a chance to get…

  • Expensive Problems >> Principles >> Practices

    End-to-end flow of value Continuous Improvement Autonomy and Empowerment Organizing Around Value Sustainable Pace Alignment around Outcome-oriented Goals Energized People Leaders who Serve Speed and Empiricism All worthy Agility Principles (at least I think so…)  But why should anyone care?  I mean, it’s much healthier to focus on principles than practices as a goal.  But…

  • Is it Time for Our Agility Work To Go Underground?

    It seems like we are working on a lot of initiatives. Could it help to get a picture of all the initiatives and where they are in the pipeline? Would it help to make sure we involve the teams and leaders who will need to execute on initiatives in the decision when to actually start…

  • What Happened to Agile? And Where Do We Go From Here

    Let’s be honest. These are “interesting” times for being an agilist. Whether you’re in the “Agile is Dead” camp or not, it is clear that the movement is not well. Agile took over the software development world in a storm. As that happened, the demand for agile outstripped the supply. Agile became practice-focused. A commodity.…