Centralized vs. Decentralized Coaching

Key Takeaways Read the original post on InfoQ.  There is a frequently seen confusion with respect to the definition of agile coaching: coaching focus (e.g. enterprise vs. team) is confused with coaching alignment (centralized vs. decentralized) within an organization Centralized coaching departments run the risk of turning into a single-specialty organizational silos that are locally … Read more

Proper Scaling of Scrum and Dynamic Financial Forecasting

Tweet The purpose of this post is to summarize two very important and independent topics and then integrate them together, into a joint discussion.  The topics are: Moving from rigid annual budgets to rolling forecasts (super important! in agile/adaptive product development environments) Quality of scaling in agile product development, specifically Scrum …and tying effective scaling of … Read more

December 6th-8th: Certified LeSS Practitioner Course With Craig Larman | NYC

Tweet Another Large-Scale Scrum Training (CLP), taught by Craig Larman in NYC, is in the CompuBox. More than thirty people from all-around the globe (North America, South America, Europe) came together for this brain-jelling learning experience! The group consisted of product owners/managers, software engineers, managers and organizational design consultants (scrum masters, coaches and trainers) – … Read more

Addressing Problems, Caused by AMMS

Tweet Nowadays, for too many organizations, Agile Maturity Metrics (AMM) have become a trusted way to measure improvements of agility at personal (individuals), team and organizational level. However, it is not always apparent to everyone that AMMs are different from Agile Check-Lists (e.g. classic example of Scrum Check list by H. Kniberg) and this can often … Read more

10/13 – LESS TALKS: MEETUP – Working LeSS Brings Great Results (Case Study)

Tweet Tonight -a  great presentation by Malik Graves-Pryor of Natoma Consulting, as he shared how his company leveraged LeSS to achieve  stunning results, while facing challenges and learning lessons. Malik’s Summary At the Thursday October 12, 2017 NYC Large Scale Scrum Meetup, Malik Graves-Pryor shared his company’s LeSS case study, “Web and Mobile Applications Agile Transformation”. He … Read more

What Should Agile Leadership Care About?

Tweet Agile frameworks (e.g. Scrum, Kanban, XP), individuals’ roles & responsibilities, processes & tools, metrics & reporting, burn-up charts, estimation techniques, backlog prioritization, agile engineering practices, agile maturity models etc. – all of them are important attributes of a typical agile transformation.  However, NONE of them are first-degree-of-importance system variables that are responsible for transformation … Read more

Parallel Organization, As a Sushi Roll

Tweet When we ask an experienced scrum master, product owner or developer define a user story, they usually understand that “…every user story must be INVEST-able…(taken from B. Hartman’s post)”. When we further elaborate on the “INVEST” part, we discover that splitting a user story is done vertically (along features), not horizontally (along components e.g. … Read more

LeSS “Construction”: What is it like?

Tweet [also, cross-posted on less. works] Large Scale Scrum (LeSS).  It is the framework for scaling agile development, done by multiple teams, as they work on same product and work for a single Product Owner.   In order to be effective, LeSS requires organizational descaling that means simplification/flattening of organizational design. What is Organizational Design? … Read more

Grassroots of Modern Command & Control Behavior

Tweet Examples of Command & Control behavior can be historically traced back into centuries, to the periods of dictatorship, imperialism, monarchy, feudalism and even further back, to more primitive social systems.  However, for the sake of this discussion, let’s refer only as far back as Industrial Revolution of the last century.  Back then, workforce predominantly … Read more