Category Archives: managing agile

Open Space Agility: Executive Action Team

Here is an idea that you can use immediately. Almost always, you have a group of people that you need or want to adapt Scrum or Agile. Open Space Agility will help you get them changed faster and better than any other method I know of. What is it? OSA is a set of ideas […]

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Agile Transformation: Don’t forget the Team

In Life and business one always asks oneself: what is real and what is not real?  What is important, and what is not important? This is hard. Well, parts are easy.  I am not interested in watching a Canasta game by random people (how many readers know the Canasta card game?), BUT I am very […]

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Agile Transformation: What is it? Success? Metrics?

Last night at Agile Carolinas we had a discussion around the following topics. What is Agile Transformation? (really) What is success? (That is, what are the characteristics of a successful agile transformation.) What should the metrics be? We hope these notes are helpful to you. What is AgileTransformation? Below are the notes we took.  Many […]

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Agile Transformation – 2

I have already started talking, but want again to continue talking about an easy subject: Transforming a company to agile. Well, not so easy. But not as hard as some people think. ‘A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.’ We are too easily discouraged by what seems a daunting task. We too […]

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What is Agile Transformation?

Problem What is Agile Transformation? Abid Quereshi said this recently: ‘”Agile transformation” is another one of our made-up terms like Agile BA, Agile Tester, Agile PM and Agile Coach.’ By this he means, as he explained, that people use a term, but do not agree on its meaning, or that the meaning is so broad as to […]

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“Do or do not. There is no try.”

Most everyone knows that quote from Yoda, and it highlights the three key things we must do, and maybe the couple things we must worry about. Don’t do it half-baked. Jeff Sutherland calls it “ScrumButt” and Ken Schwaber calls it Flaccid Scrum. (The second is not my favorite phrase.) You don’t play a game using […]

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Defining Agile at Your Firm (or in your Department)

The Idea (or the Practice) Let me propose an idea. I am happier if you call it a practice. The idea is simple.  That agreeing on what you are doing will help.  Or, that not agreeing and only kinda sorta roughly trying to do [agile] is likely to lead to notably less-good results. And I […]

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Executive’s Guide to Scrum

I enjoy everything Jeff Sutherland writes about Scrum. I found this document (see below) on OpenView Partner’s website (Jeff Sutherland is affiliated, especially regarding Scrum). In this case, I do not know for sure that he wrote this document (Executive’s Guide to Scrum), but I do know that, even if he did not write it all, […]

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Scale down!

In some situations you feel forced to scale. We recommend: Scale down. George Harrison has a nice song called “Cheer Down!” which is a play on the idea of “cheer up!” Similarly, in my opinion, too many people want to scale up and create more and more layers and add complexity to scaling. This is […]

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Spotify Scaling Model

Here is some reference information about the Spotify scaling model. Most of this information is via Henrik Kniberg. Here is the key article: “Scaling Agile @ Spotify with Tribes, Squads, Chapters & Guilds” — A blog post (2012). It also links to a longer article in the third paragraph which is pretty key. Here are […]

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