Mapping Mondays – Gameplay Posted on July 29, 2019May 5, 2020 by Cory Foy Happy Mapping Monday! This week starts a new series of videos highlighting how I apply Wardley Mapping concepts for my clients and how you can think about them for your own business. This week’s video covers the basics of Gameplay, highlighting the idea of separating out and being deliberate about Where you go after opportunities… Read more
Aligning Your Strategy with the Purpose-Based Alignment Model Posted on March 9, 2018 by Cory Foy Nearly my entire adult life I’ve traveled in some form or another. In a band you drive on tour, and even when I was dating my wife I would drive from Florida to Virginia nearly every other weekend. So when it comes to traveling I have a very experienced sense of what it’s going to… Read more
Mapping Your Way To Success Posted on March 5, 2018April 12, 2018 by Cory Foy Ever seen an island in a lake in an island in a lake? This unusual combination exists, and you can go check it out. I included a map above for you to find it. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Did you find it? Chances are, the “map” I gave you wasn’t very useful. It showed the… Read more
Building Trust Through Cadenced Retrospectives Posted on October 10, 2017October 10, 2017 by Cory Foy One of the hallmarks of effective teams is trust. This applies not just to the interpersonal relationships between team members, but also to the relationship the team itself has to other teams and the rest of the organization – especially management. In a low trust environment, any attempt to bring about new changes, especially from… Read more
Waterfall, Agile and Lean (Oh My!) Posted on August 29, 2017August 30, 2017 by Cory Foy For many people, the word “Waterfall” causes a visceral reaction – especially in the context of projects and organizations. Unfortunately, I’m starting to come across more places where “Agile” causes the same reaction of disgust and fear. The fundamental problem is that we’ve let bad management hide behind methodology and frameworks. At their core, Waterfall,… Read more
Incremental versus Iterative: The Church Analogy Posted on April 21, 2017 by Cory Foy Along the path towards agility inevitably one comes across the terms iterative and incremental. I have seen many cases where the terms are used interchangeably, even though the mindset behind them is pretty different. To understand how, let’s introduce Roberta and the Church Analogy. Roberta (in our analogy) is the lead pastor for a rapidly… Read more
What Is Agility? Posted on April 17, 2017 by Cory Foy In my last post, I gave some examples of the difference between Implementing Agile and Transforming to Agility. But like the term “Agile”, agility is an often overloaded term that means different things to different people. When I talk about agility to clients, the conversation focuses on the agility of the business, which is different… Read more
Implementing Agile, or Transforming to Agility? Posted on April 11, 2017 by Cory Foy Implementing Agile practices is easy: (Manager to team): “You have new roles! You’re the ScrumMaster, you’re the Product Owner, and the rest of you are the team.” (Manager in meetings): “And we’ll have these new meetings! You all will get together once a day to talk about your progress, and every two weeks you’ll show… Read more
From Clarity to Confidence: A Flow of Software Development Posted on February 17, 2017 by Cory Foy “This is awesome!” Jenny, the Product Manager exclaims to the team. “We’ve been having some challenges retaining customers, and I think we’ve got just the right idea of how to fix it! It’ll require a little retooling of our sign-up flow, but I think the impact will be incredible.” Great ideas are some of the… Read more
Prioritization vs Sequencing Posted on July 25, 2016 by Cory Foy When teams get introduced to various agile methods, one of the seemingly easy aspects is the notion of the product backlog. They then ask their business parts to prioritize the work in the backlog so the team(s) can pull the highest priority item. It sounds easy because people think that priorities are binary. In reality,… Read more