The main message of the retrospective was clear: there are too many interruptions by stakeholders and senior management. The interruptions impeded the flow of work through the team. Consequently, achieving the sprint goal had been at risk several times in the past. Moreover, the team missed the sprint goal twice recently. Solving impediments as a team has become a necessity.
Learn more on how to tackle impediments as a team by running experiments and iterating on the solution.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #164—shared with 19,635 peers—focuses on successful behavioral patterns of servant leaders, the reasons why change at an organizational level is so hard, and how to cherry-pick existing agile scaling frameworks from SAFe® to Nexus and LeSS.
We also learn from Trello’s example how to scale a product organization, what path Buffer chose to create their new minimum lovable analytics tool, and that distributed teams do not stand in the way of building excellent products.
Lastly, we follow Dave West when he outlines the five most pressing challenges of agile transformations and how to deal with them.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #163—shared with 19,504 peers—focuses on building agile teams. We learn that a group of folks being in the same place at the same time does not constitute a team, that throwing money at the challenge cannot buy success. It seems, though, that successful team coaching is a long and windy road.
We also come back to another favorite topic—how to avoid building the wrong product—and understand that continuous product discovery based on hypotheses and experiments is essential for product success.
Lastly, we secretly enjoy some schadenfreude when diving into the reasons why big organizations squander brilliant ideas.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #162—shared with 19,373 peers—focuses on the problem of imposing agile practices top-down to achieve organizational agility, why enterprise organizations are so nerve-wreckingly slow, and why commitment cultures seem to produce better outcomes.
We then dive deep into product strategy. From how to be more strategic, to establishing an effective process, to running bets from a portfolio of innovation options.
Lastly, we applaud Puppet for providing the community with the 2018 edition of the State of DevOps report, now including a maturity model.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #161—shared with 19,269 peers—covers Toyota Scrum, a combination of the Toyota Production System and Scrum, we learn that Lean, Agile and Design Thinking absolutely make good partners, and how Ron Jeffries might express XP practices nowadays.
We then borrow leadership practices from winning sports teams for Scrum teams, we take five tips to heart to prevent product failures, and we gain new insight on how to de-risk the innovation process.
Lastly, we dive into a notorious decision making trap: the sunk cost fallacy.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #160—shared with 19,162 peers—addresses a need we all share: our whiteboard skills. We also follow Ian Mitchell’s idea to move from predicting a shipping date to providing a likelihood of completion with Monte Carlo forecasting. We also appreciate Ron Jeffries’ thoughts beyond XP and Scrum.
We then revisit a favorite topic—how to deal with our nemesis, the sales folks—, we consider complementing Design Thinking with Scrum, and we learn how to become faster than the competition in identifying the non-obvious, yet lucrative market opportunity.
Lastly, we have another survey running: join 140-plus peers and share your greatest success solving an issue outside your sphere of control.
