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

2018 BUSINESS AGILITY CONFERENCE – NYC

Summary 2018 Business Agility Conference @ NYC is in the books.  More than 300 people attended – they came from all over the world: to listen  to selected speakers, on great topics.  Evan Leybourn (the main organizer) also announced the birth of Business Agility Institute. On impulse, and with a lot of excitement,  NYC-based meet-up … 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

“Who are the Judges?” Who Decides on Who is Gonna Coach?

Tweet Lets kick off this post with the quote from another recent discussion that generated a number of strong comments from experienced professionals: “…as long as companies remain complacent and reliant on outlived staffing/head-hunting approaches, cold-calling techniques, and ineffective HR-screening processes, performed by people that poorly understand the essence of an agile coaching profession, while trying to … Read more

You Get What you Ask For: Agile Coaches-“Centaurs”

Tweet If you were a company’s CEO and had a very clear and urgent need to improve your organization, to stay competitive and successful in a marketplace, and therefore, were looking for guide-level senior advisers and coaches, whom you could trust and rely on during your challenging journey, who would you choose:  people on the … Read more