How to Create an Agile Community of Practice

TL; DR: Creating an Agile Community of Practice

Creating an agile community of practice helps winning hearts and minds within the organization as it provides authenticity to the agile transition — signaling that the effort is not merely another management fad.

Read more to learn how to get your agile community going even without a dedicated budget and how to make it work with distributed teams.

📺 Update 2023-05-11: Recently, Petra Wille published the findings of her study on how to establish and grow a product community of practice based on interviewing 100-plus practitioners. Watch her talk now!

How to Create an Agile Community of Practice — Age-of-Product.com
Continue reading How to Create an Agile Community of Practice

Agile Negotiations

TL; DR: Life Is a Negotiation; Why Would Scrum Be Different?

Life is a negotiation; why would Scrum be different, particularly given its egalitarian nature? As you may recall, no one on a Scrum team can tell anyone else what to do, how to do it, or when to do it. Instead, solving your customers’ problems in a complex environment requires communication skills, empathy, patience, diplomacy, and professionalism. So let’s have a look at some typical agile negotiation scenarios.

Agile Negotiations — Age-of-Product.com
Continue reading Agile Negotiations

The Stoic Scrum Master

TL; DR: The Stoic Scrum Master – Making Your Scrum Work (30)

Can wisdom from the past still be relevant to today’s VUCA-determined world? I started reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations some time ago and found it intriguing; maybe it applies to “Agile?” In other words: is there something like a Stoic Scrum Master?

If I understand Stoicism correctly, it is about living a life of virtue, which comprises wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation. (All of those can be further subdivided, see Stoic Ethics.) For whatever reason, I felt reminded of Scrum Values and thought: could it be that the first principles of “agile” haven’t been defined by the Agile Manifesto but by “Zeno of Citium in Athens in the early 3rd century BCE?”

So, I embarked on a fun exercise of asking our beloved LLM to create an essay that applies Stoicism to Scrum, notably the Stoic Scrum Master.

The Stoic Scrum Master — Making Your Scrum Work #30 — Age-of-Product.com
Continue reading The Stoic Scrum Master

Agile Transformation: ChatGPT or McBoston?

TL; DR: Agile Transformation with ChatGPT or McBoston?

This article is another excursion into this nascent yet fascinating new technology of generative AI and LLMs and the future of knowledge work. I was interested in learning more about a typical daily challenge many agile practitioners face: How shall we successfully pursue an agile transformation? Shall we outsource the effort to one of the big consultancies — McBoston? Or shall we embark on an agile transformation with ChatGPT providing some guidance?

If technology can pass a Wharton MBA exam, maybe, it deserves some attention. We thought that AI might initially come after simple office jobs. I am no longer sure about that. Maybe, ChatGPT’s successor will start at the top of the food chain.

Agile Transformation: ChatGPT or McBoston? Age-of-Product.com
Continue reading Agile Transformation: ChatGPT or McBoston?

Agility and Scrum According to OpenAI’s ChatGPT — Be Surprised!

TL; DR: Business Agility, Scrum and Generative AI’s Take on Getting There

There has been a lot of talking about generative AI recently, mainly fueled by excellent work results in the text and graphics area. A few days ago, OpenAI made a new model available that “interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.” (Source.)

I thought it might be fun to ask ChatGPT a few questions about business agility in general and Scrum in particular.

Generative AI: OpenAI’s ChatGPT on Business Agility and Scrum — Age-of-Product.com
Continue reading Agility and Scrum According to OpenAI’s ChatGPT — Be Surprised!

Shift Left: Value Creation in Scrum

TL; DR: Value Creation in Scrum

As a tactical framework, Scrum is good at delivering Increments into customers’ hands. As we work in iterations, we probably do that several times per month, mitigating risk by closing feedback loops. Nevertheless, there is a potentially hazardous void in the framework that successful Scrum teams start plugging early: how to figure out what is worth building—product discovery—in the first place. As a result, value creation in Scrum is not as straightforward as you might have thought.

Value Creation in Scrum — Shift Left — Age-of-Product.com
Continue reading Shift Left: Value Creation in Scrum