Category: Agile
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Making Work More Human
In the best, most productive teams I’ve worked with, people acted very naturally. On those teams, there were a lot of casual conversations where people talked about different things not related to work, people joked and laughed, but there was also the ability for the team to focus intensely and to be incredibly productive. I…
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Maximize Productivity by Minimizing Context Switching
Why Splitting People Across Projects Kills Productivity It looks clean and clear on a resource plan, but the problem with split-allocations and context-switching are all the hidden costs that damage your team’s focus, speed, and morale. Organizations often deal with having high work in progress, with lots of projects for new features, software and security…
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Transforming Agile Practices with the Kano Model
Many agile transformations focus on replacing rigid, waterfall processes with a standard set of ceremonies, roles, and artifacts. Agile maturity is often measured by how many of these practices a team has adopted, or making sure they’ve adopted the right ones: Long-lived teams are “more agile” than project teams; frequent deployments are “more agile” than…
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People Are the Heart of Any Practice
There’s an endless number of boxes for different Agile practices that organizations are eager to tick off, including various ceremonies, roles, and activities. Frustration with Agile maturity models is related to how they sometimes grade Agile maturity as a volume measurement of doing “more Agile,” regardless of outcomes being created. While Agile practices can be…
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Unbundle the Value
What I see time and again while working on big projects in large corporations is that often, ambitious project plans are started that depend on dozens of new things all going right. Delivering anything in a large organization can be a challenge, and needing to get many new things all right, all on time, is…
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Just Do Something Different
When we talk about agile ways of working, we often emphasize the importance of continuous improvement. Frameworks like Scrum and lean/agile methods, such as A3 thinking and Toyota Kata, provide teams with techniques to implement evolutionary and hypothesis-driven change. While these are all valuable tools, sometimes, the focus on process and planning introduces friction and…
Flow Focused 