When looking at ways to organize for agility, we often turn to the classic agile team as the “one structure to rule them all”. Yet in my experience this is only one of several organizing structures that I have seen. This article provides a description of other ways people can organize to increase collaboration, documented […]
Before We Get Started Before facilitating an Organizing For Agility workshop it’s important to lay down a few ground rules. Invite Everyone First try to involve as many people who are impacted by the change as you can. Emphasis on invite, the last thing you want is a room full of non participants. So make […]
Before I get into some techniques we can use to facilitate organizational design, as part of my next book, I thought it would be important to lay out a few overarching principles we can use to guide our thinking. These principles are: Organize For Cross Functionality, not Functional Specialization Organize Based On Market Pull Try […]
The New Mental Model for Formal Organizational Structure For decades the predominant mental model for an organization has been based on the hierarchy. We grouped people, typically according to specialized capability, and put a single manager in charge of the group. As the group grew larger we in turn grouped similar manager’s and the people […]
Agile Teams in a nutshell Agile teams are awesome. The how and why of agile teams are relatively straight forward concepts. The value of why you would want to rethink your organization as a set of agile teams is reasonably apparent to most people I talk to, but let’s do a quick recap and touch […]
The traditional approach to organizational design has got it wrong, completely wrong. More specifically, traditional org design models are a barrier if you want grow an organization where smart people make amazing decisions that delight customers and enrich their careers. If you talk to many in the organizational design profession, they will lead you down […]
Full Stack Poker is a game I came up with to help further the dialogue between various stake holders who are tasked with getting the right skills into teams responsible for delivering value. I am still in the process of play testing the game with clients, practitioners, etc but early results are good, its a […]
OK, so now that we want to have a dialogue with others around Agile as a Mindset, how do we go about having that dialogue? What posture do we take? when do we have the dialogue and when do we back off? Who do we have the discussion with? How do we start? What kind […]
Ok. In my last post, I picked on various Agile Methodologies. It hurt to do it, and I may have offended a few of you. An important point, my issue is not with these Agile Methodologies. It’s with the idea that we can describe Agile as a methodology. That’s why I included the awesome Agile […]
What do we mean when we say “we are Agile” (Don’t forget to capitalize the A)? When you say Agile are you talking about the same thing I am? Do we agree when we say we are done our Agile Transformation? No, we don’t. My definition of what it means for an team/department/organization/enterprise to be […]
