Year: 2023
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The Power of Predictable Delivery
With most of the Agile teams I’ve been exposed to, I’ve noticed that they spend easily over a hundred person-hours every month on practices like updating plans, reporting metrics, estimating, and sharing status updates. To them, these are some of the core practices that make them Agile. In general, as a way to be less…
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Manage the Value, Not the Work
Do you think of software development as an exercise in identifying the right problem, doing the right analysis and getting the right people to code the right features? Or is it more of a discovery and learning activity where you make a bet, build something and get feedback? In the former approach, organizations will create…
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Avoiding The Pitfalls of Cross-Functional Super Teams
I’ve previously written about cross-functional teams and what it means for a team to be cross-functional. In that same post, I wrote about Team Topology’s concept of a stream-aligned team. To recap, stream-aligned teams: Suppose autonomous and independent cross-functional teams that own an entire “slice” of a business domain are the ideal way to organize…
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An Agile Alternative to “Fixing”
One of my go-to definitions of Agile is working in a way of safely making progress and moving forward with imperfect information. In the journey to becoming Agile, organizations face many obstacles. Whatever their goals, there are a lot of organizational, cultural and technical challenges and constraints that teams and organizations face. When faced with…
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Where Are The Problems?
When I first started coaching teams, I aimed to teach people the techniques and methods they could use to manage their work better. Recently, I’ve adopted a different approach that actually leaves techniques for last and instead starts with problems and needs. I was thinking about my initial approach and how it’s changed over the…
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Rethinking Retrospectives
I sometimes get asked by managers if they should add the action items created in their team retrospective meetings to their kanban boards. More explicit management of retrospective outputs happens when managers start getting unsatisfied with their teams’ progress at improving their metrics, shortening their lead times, or meeting their commitments. They believe by visualizing…
Flow Focused 