No matter if you are a Scrum Master or an agile coach, sooner or later, you will run into a problem that’s outside of the team’s sphere of control. The question is: How do you solve impediments of this kind? What approach has worked best for you in the past?
Barry Overeem, Christiaan Verwijs and I teamed up to provide some transparency in this matter and share your best techniques and approach with the agile community. All it takes to contribute is five minutes of your time to participate in the anonymous ‘how to solve impediments’ survey. (We expect results to be available in November.)
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #159—shared with 19,054 peers—covers the agile industrial complex and its fake-agile distortion field, according to Daniel Mezick, we kick-off new Scrum teams, and we advocate to manage the flow of work, not people.
We also appreciate another success story from the continuous product discovery field, supported by a proven & tested reference idea funnel, and ask: is Design Thinking merely preserving the status quo?
Lastly, we address agile sensemaking—a visualization of working and learning in a state of perpetual beta.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #158—shared with 18,935 peers—visits the poster child of self-managed organizations—Semco—, we deal with building trust in teams, and we learn why agile companies no longer require plans.
We appreciate Roman Pichler’s sprint planning tips & tricks for product owners, we dive into the commandments of outstanding products, and we understand how falling in love with a solution can wreck a whole organization.
Lastly, we come back to product discovery and learn a new approach how to reinvent a strategy to figure out what’s worth building.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #157—shared with 18,862 peers—applauds Martin Fowler for his Agile Australia keynote on Agile 2018, we learn about the road to mediocrity, and we ask: Is the Peter Principle not a satire but reality?
We also address the issue of hidden (technical) costs of being ‘agile,’ as well the how to solve the conflict between prioritizing business needs as well as maintaining the health of the code base.
Lastly, we deal with the challenges of planning poker in a short and entertaining video.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #156—shared with 18,778 peers—focuses on servant leadership, why change cannot be rushed, and how one road to enterprise business agility may look like.
We also have a look at mental models for product managers/owner; we learn how free time from our schedules to run user interviews regularly, and how to avoid failure when reaching for product/market fit.
Lastly, we like to thank Bartosz for compiling a great list of resources to help us to apply servant leadership in the trenches. 🙏
TL;DR: Webinar Agile Maturity and Agility Assessment
Is agile maturity a fad or a trend? How can an organization make an informed decision on what level of agility might become achievable before starting a transition?
Our second webinar addressed the question of agile maturity and detailed the survey results on what indicates an agile organization. Moreover, we introduced the ‘Agility Assessment Framework’ open source project which aims to provide agile practitioners with the tools needed to answer these questions.
