Category: General

On Friday, I had the wonderful opportunity to present at TriAgile 2014. My talk on The Agile Mindset – Agility Across Your Organization got a lot of great feedback, and I wanted to share the slides here. The key takeaway would be: if we relentlessly and ruthlessly focus on removing the delays in our organization,…

One of the most important patterns to come from modern web development is the idea of Model-View-Controller – in effect, separating out our data logic from the view of said data, as well as the separation of how that data and view gets wired up. This works really well when you have a single team,…

One of the key approaches of good software development is building software iteratively and incrementally. Iterating over our process and software gives us a chance to reflect on how we are working, while building increments of functionality allows us to begin to deliver functionality and value (in the form of working software) early. This feedback…

Organizations are filled with decisions. Well-run organizations enable decisions to be made at any level – ideally at the level closest to the work being done. But sometimes it can be difficult to know if a decision is good or not. As a team, you can talk about the challenges, the benefits, and the goals,…

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a large scale retrospective I facilitated to get some rapid insights from a large team in just one hour. This week we were able to bring in a fuller set of the team, but were still under time constraints – just 3 hours. We needed to solve…

Individuals and Interactions over Processes and Tools Responding to Change over Following a Plan When teams and organizations look towards better agility, they generally start with one of the known frameworks out there – most often Scrum but also SAFe or many of the other agile methods. But one of the key principles from the…

I like sharing things I’m working on. When I’ve searched for a solution, and not found one, I hope that sharing what I did find will help some other poor schmuck like me in the future. In fact, more than once I’ve done a search for a problem, and found a solution – in one…

Yesterday I ran a largish retrospective for about 60 Program Managers, Product Owners, ScrumMasters and Team Leads. Since a couple of people had asked me on Twitter about how I ran it, I wanted to go through a mini-retrospective of it. Background In this program, there are about 25 teams working together on a large-scale…

One of the unique things that consultants get is a view of the dysfunctions of lots of organizations. We know which dysfunctions are normal, and which are, well, special. It’s easy to pick out the challenges, because not only are you a fresh set of eyes on the problem, but you are also not integrated…

One of the holy grails of agile software development is the concept of “Self-Organizing teams.” This can be seen in the principles of the Agile Manifesto which says “The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” While much has been said about the misconceptions of self-organizing teams as well as the role of…