Category Archives: Change Management

A list summarizing Scrum

We have a slightly improved version of our ‘List Summarizing Scrum.’ Not many changes, but a few minor ones. A list summarizing ScrumV6. How can this be useful? First, it is only a list, and prints onto one page (front and back). Two proposed uses: 1. Visit a team, and discuss the list fairly quickly. […]

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“It’s a mixed up muddled up shook up world”

I suppose we can all agree, after reading any newspaper, that the outside world is… mixed up, muddled up and shook up. Do we let ourselves see that this is also true of the world and the people immediately around us?  And maybe — ah! — even ourselves? Agile and Scrum are ways to work […]

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Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior

This is what Craig Larman says on his website. I quote that page in full:   Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior After decades of observation and organizational consulting, here are Larman’s Laws of Organizational Behavior. These are observations rather than laws to follow. Organizations are implicitly optimized to avoid changing the status quo middle- and first-level […]

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The Management Scrum Team

This is an important idea that more and more people are talking about. One aspect: Managers can learn best what Scrum is and what agile is by being on a ‘real’ Scrum team. A more important aspect: Managers can be more effective on a multi-functional Scrum team. (Often.) *** STOP!  Why am I writing this […]

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Changing the culture through invitation and engagement

Some of you know my phrase: “People are remarkably good at doing what they want to do.” It is a down to earth way of saying: I think self-organization is the right thing. Or, I believe in freedom. Believing in freedom does not mean Congress will always vote the way you want.  Or even vote […]

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How to make the Whole Organization Agile

Steve Denning has written a short article summarizing his thoughts on this subject.  Very interesting. How To Make The Whole Organization Agile In the article you will see links to his blog posts and a mention of his book: The Leader’s Guide to Radical Management. Enjoy!

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State of Agile Survey 2015 – Version One

Version One does an annual survey of the state of agile.  Very useful. I am not sure it is a scientific survey, but it tries and generally gives some useful insight. See here. To me, it says progress is being made.  That is, more people are using Agile, and lives are getting better.  That is […]

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Do we really believe in autonomy at work?

How autonomous should knowledge workers be?  A lot? If we believe this, where does this lead us?  That’s the theme of this post. Earlier the subject line of this post included ‘freedom.’  This word carries more emotional energy, and requires discussion of other issues.  Hence, the change. And do we, the workers and the managers […]

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Proposal: Learn about Open Agile Adoption

Imagine that we, the agile advocates, have agile going a little bit in our organization.  How do we get it more broadly adopted? One challenge is wanting everyone doing something that is consistent and reasonably professional.  (This could be any of several flavors of agile, but for now, imagine Scrum.)  We want this because of […]

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Making Change Happen

How do we make change happen? First, this is an interesting and somewhat difficult question. No one knows the complete answer. Change does happen, and people ascribe causes to why the change happens (or does not happen). The facts are very messy so it is hard to be sure, and hard to know if we are sometimes lying […]

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