Musings about Agile Thinking
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The team at the center
Reading time: 4 min
When talking about agile practices, the distinction between projects and products often comes up. The idea is that the limited lifespan of projects tends to be pushed onto the delivery team, which leads to the team being assembled at the onset and dismantled when the project completes. Agile practitioners advocate for a product view, where teams are dedicated to a specific product and deliver incremental value at a regular cadence, across initiative lifespans. This usually works really well, and I too favour a similar way of working in most cases. However, I have recently seen various examples of this idea being misinterpreted, which creates a situation in which teams struggle, largely due to their setup.
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Business Agility: What it is, and how it can benefit you
Reading time: 3 min
The modern marketplace is constantly evolving. Customers expect a fast return on investment of both their time and money. The complexity of many technology solutions now resides behind easily consumable web interfaces and SaaS services, making it easy to rapidly switch to alternative products. It is easier than ever to “try before you buy”, and if you don’t feel like you are getting the value, try something else. To counter this, consider how introducing Business Agility practices can protect and improve your bottom line.
Meet the learning organization
Reading time: 3 min
The Greek philosopher Heraclitus was onto something when he said many years ago that
“Change is the only constant”
A saying as true today as it was for Heraclitus in Ancient Greece.
Today, businesses are impacted by change. Competitors introduce new capabilities or services, customers' loyalty shifts from brands towards value propositions, and new and exciting players disrupt the market altogether.
Directing Flow
Reading time: 8 min
Introducing organizational change is a tricky business, especially when it involves new technology. Even seemingly innocuous changes to technology can have a far-reaching impact on your organization, disrupting the ways you work. Your initial vision of a smooth implementation, rapid adoption, and a high return on investment is easy to say, not so easy to achieve. For example, it is widely discussed that 70% of transformations fail.
Face-to-face with the agile manifesto... Working with remote team members
Reading time: 5 min
As health specialists and governments encourage employees to work from home en masse, many employers start fearing the impact on their teams’ productivity. After all, the agile manifesto states as one of its principles:
“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
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Are we doomed to return to less agile ways of working? Will we see productivity plummet? Will we see new value being released only ever so often?
Online teams are less effective than collocated teams
Let’s first start with this breaking down this statement.
The main difference between online (or remote) and collocated teams is the way in which they communicate. Collocated teams benefit from what Alistair Cockburn calls osmotic communication. You could explain it as transfer of information and knowledge by virtue of being in physical proximity with your team, where all work is done, where all frustrations are voiced and all intentional and unintenti...
Project vs Product
Reading time: 3 min
We talk about this a lot but do not always do a good job of explaining why it is so important. I would argue not understanding this difference and developing this mindset can cause your whole transformation to stall.
So what do we mean when we say project vs product and why is it so critical?
Read below for my thoughts on the topic.
How to scale the transformation
Reading time: 4 min
Your organization is changing and undergoing transformation. You’ve rolled out Agile (Scrum and Kanban), you’ve scaled it (SAFe, LeSS, etc.) and even applied DevOps practices (you’re using Kubernetes right? Isn’t that DevOps?) Yet still, millions later, the purported value has yet to materialize.
So how come, after all this work, we still have not realized the value?
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, perhaps we are still stuck in old ways of thinking. Real transformation requires new ways of thinking about the problems and in the case of the examples above, have we really changed? (Kubernetes is an orchestration framework for containers and does not equate to having adopted DevOps).
With millions spent already, what are we missing?