Suitable agile metrics reflect either a team’s progress in becoming agile or your organization’s progress in becoming a learning organization.
At the team level, qualitative agile metrics often work better than quantitative metrics. At the organizational level, this is reversed: quantitative agile metrics provide better insights than qualitative ones.
TL; DR: Lipstick Agile — Happiness in the Trenches?
Have you noticed how many people in the agile field are unhappy with their work situation? A situation where an organization already struggles doing agile, not to mention ‘becoming agile?’ This is what I call lipstick Agile.
Scrum Masters and agile coaches are close to either burnout or indifference. Product Owners who “own” the product by name only, and developers questioning why “Agile” is imposed upon them and often turns out to be just another form of micromanagement.
Do you need an emergency fund as a change agent—whether you are acting as Scrum Master, Product Owner, or agile coach—because conflict is inevitable, but change is not? Speaking truth to power probably comes at a price.
In my experience, speaking truth to power, pointing at the emperor’s new clothes and the reality in the trenches, is necessary a trait for every change agent — including Scrum Masters and agile coaches — in organizations that lack strong leadership.
Learn more, how this form of professional honesty can backfire when the incumbents, privileged by the existing system, strike back.
We are used to saying the Scrum is a perfect probe for organizations, as it will reliably discover all dysfunctionalities. Since the pandemic has forced many of us to work remotely, this unique capability has been kicked into overdrive regarding remote agile transitions.
Here are my top-10 challenges of organizational change that remote Agile has made more urgent to address than ever before.
The first insights are available from the Remote Agile Survey: What are good remote agile practices, and what are possible low-hanging fruits that haven’t yet been tried by a majority of participants? Moreover, we learn if new collaboration practices have been tested and if so what those are.
There has been no shortage of articles on how to work remotely recently, including our series on remote Agile. While most of the ideas, lessons learned, and tips and tricks may not be new to those few remote work pioneers, they are, however, to the rest of us. The question hence is: What remote work problems are agile teams and organizations facing, and what has proven to be successful in the transition? Answering these two questions is the purpose of the Remote Agile Survey: Let us stop guessing but collect data instead to inspect and adapt the way we can work as an agile distributed team.