Category Archives: Change Management

Agile Adoption: Two Styles Contrasted

Imagine a smallish organization with 10 Scrum teams (or what will be 10 Scrum teams).  I want you to be thinking of a relatively uncomplicated situation. Imagine that you offered two ways to implement agile. Let us assume that we believe that agile will lead to better lives for the workers and better lives for […]

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Avoid an Agile Adoption that’s ‘Meh’

There are many ways to adopt Agile or Scrum. And in a sense, it is true that each organization adopts agile in it’s own way. One broad set of patterns is ‘bottom-up’.  This means that it starts with one team, who finds out about it and starts doing it, and then it spreads.  Without official […]

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Culture & Agile & Change at the NYC Scrum Users Group

On March 20th, 2014, we had a great discussion.  The group was great, very active participation. Thanks especially to Rob and Mary, and also to many old and new friends. Here is the slide share. Mainly we discussed Fearless Change. This is the work of Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising. They are soon to […]

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Open Agile Adoption

Open Agile Adoption is an ‘open’ approach to adopting and evolving agile in a given company or group. By ‘open’ we mean that we are engaging the people (who will be changing) in designing the change. We do not mean total chaos.  Management might establish some ‘guardrails’ (eg, we will do Agile as defined in […]

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Basic Agile ‘scaling’ terms

Below are several key terms often used when discussing ‘Agile Scaling.’ They need to be addressed. Why? My experience is that when the community talks about these issues, they use these words in a very loose way.  The problems behind these words are quite real. The problems can  be somewhat improved if we work hard […]

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Culture: Some steps to improve it (for Scrum)

I have been thinking a lot about corporate culture lately, and what we can do to change it. For example, to enable Scrum to get better results. Here is one article by John Kotter.  Pretty good I think. So, what can we do.  Here’s my advice to myself: 1. “Whether you think you can or […]

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Changing culture

I am giving a presentation at Southern Fried Agile on Oct 18th, 2013. On “Culture & Agile & Change”. Here is the presentation slide deck so far.  To me, it is mainly a reference and a take-away.  It does highlight some of the key things I will say (and many things I am sure I […]

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What is culture? When do we start to change it?

Some of us in the Agile community think:  an organization’s culture needs to change before agile can be fully adopted. This certainly seems to be true. Let’s define this more precisely.  The idea is this: Before a company can realize the full and extreme benefits of lean-agile-scrum, it must change its corporate culture to be […]

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Starting agile adoption

Imagine that you have some interest in Agile. Perhaps you read a book, and talked with a friend who is doing agile at his firm. Then you take a Scrum course. Now what do you do? Let’s take a middle of the road case, where you have a software development group of 80 or so, […]

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Scrum is Hard! (Scrum is fun!)

The classic phrase from Sutherland and Schwaber is: Scrum is simple, but Scrum is hard. Yet, with almost any decent Team, Scrum is fun. Unless the personal chemistry is dysfunctional. So: If I don’t warn you that Scrum is hard, I am lying. But if I don’t ‘warn’ you that Scrum will be fun, I […]

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