Coaching From Home

THIS IS DIFFERENT… As agile coaches, we know ourselves as agents of change and servant leaders. Historically, the effectiveness of our service has been best accomplished through in-person human-to-human interaction and the exchange of ideas. The idea of working from home is, well, different. It brings forth a brand new world and one that calls […]

Coaching, Team Collaboration / 21 Mar 2020

How to Run A POWERful Meeting

Have you ever looked up halfway through a meeting wondering what the heck the reason for the meeting is!? Have you ever ended a meeting, with no clear direction or action items? I know I have, and it can be frustrating. As an Agile Coach, traditional boardroom meetings are not something that we tend to […]

Team Collaboration / 17 Sep 2019

Build a ‘House Rules’ Artifact

Often teams experience daily issues that they feel can be improved but don’t feel like they have an outlet to bring it up. How should a team maximize the ability to continuously improve? Here is the story of a team that was experiencing events that they were eager to improve, and here is what they […]

Continuous Improvement / 12 Sep 2019

Refining Your Organizing Structure Through Team Collaboration Patterns

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 […]

Team Collaboration / 05 Sep 2019

Merge Your Sprint Planning & Retrospective Using A CFD

I’ve worked with self-starting teams that enjoy the opportunity to discuss improvement opportunities. However, that is not always the case. It is unfortunately common for teams to struggle to see the value in getting together regularly and identifying areas for improvement. There are many possible reasons for this. Some are internally driven. A feeling of […]

Delivery Planning / 29 Aug 2019

Use a CFD to Plan Your Team’s Delivery

When working on a new initiative, teams often have a tough time thinking through the strategy and mechanics of how it will be delivered. Most times Agile teams will go with a burndown or velocity approach. A velocity approach negates the appreciation of what happens between start and finish. You miss the opportunity to enhance […]

Delivery Planning / 29 Aug 2019

Facilitating an Organizing For Agility Workshop

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 […]

Uncategorized / 24 Aug 2019

Principles To Guide Your Agile Organizational Design

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 […]

Uncategorized / 21 Aug 2019

Fundamental Agile Organizing Structures

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 […]

Uncategorized / 13 Aug 2019

Truths, Myths and Lies about The Agile Team

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 […]

Uncategorized / 08 Aug 2019