Food for Agile Thought’s issue #143—shared with 17,473 peers—covers the pain of scrum teams working for ignorant management and improves our problem-solving capacity thanks to mental models from the circle of competence to Hanlon’s razor.
We applaud Mike Cohn for sharing ten practices, a scrum master should take to heart, and we learn how to create an agile community of practice and why that is a critical success factor. Also, we embrace the idea of guerilla user testing and building an information radiator for your team.
Lastly, we enjoy Des Traynor’s talk about figuring out what is worth building and taking it from there with style.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #142—shared with 17,322 peers—covers corporate innovation failure patterns, dives into flow metrics for Scrum, and asks: does more planning make the team more successful?
We also shed light on systemic issues that may trigger bad behavior in people and try to understand better whether design thinking is indeed “BS.” (Some do not think so, a Danish toy manufacturer, for example, check their case study on running design thinking at scale.)
Lastly, we like to invite you to participate in the Scrum Master Trends Survey 2018 — a joined-venture of Scrum.org and Age of Product.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #141—shared with 17,129 peers—analyzes why ‘agile’ is the most important social technology since Taylorism. Although, the proxy discussion of ‘outcome vs. output’ raging in many organizations signals that organizational debt is still a wide-spread issue.
We also cover the latest opportunities that innovative technology provides—unless your organization suffers from the not-invented-here syndrome, of course. (We also feature a list of 50 epic corporate innovation failures.)
Lastly, we get into the trenches and ask: why should teams not select themselves?
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #140—shared with 16,912 peers—dives into making smart decisions (under uncertainty) and feels with the agile hero of Greek-style transition tragedy. (To counter this possibly frustrating reading experience, we also feature the thoughts of a CEO how to transition in the right way.)
We also analyze the universe of “minimum viable [add something of your choice here],” and we look beyond the traditional NPS metric to define customer success—there is more out there.
Lastly, we get a better understanding of why so many organizations excel at optimizing one thing incrementally and utterly fail at anything innovative. (Are organizations thus probably damned to keep the problem alive they wanted to fix initially?)
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #139—shared with 16,718 peers—reports on Haier’s organizational principles that encourage self-organization and entrepreneurship lifting the company at one level with Zappos, Patagonia or Semco.
We also analyze how fear prevents psychological safety, we address the metrics fetish and learn why even these fail to avoid sunk costs in product development.
Lastly, we ask: Is the manifesto of agile software development in need of an overhaul?
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #138—shared with 16,548 peers—focuses on large-scale agile: Jeff Sutherland shares success stories from large organizations turning around, we learn about BDD treaties as a means to coordinate teams, and why self-selection of teams has such a profound impact on organizations.
We also dive deep into first principles. (If you like to ‘reinvent the wheel’ as a creative approach this article is for you.) Moreover, we improve our communication skills with developers and learn how to design and ship successful product.
Lastly, we address the need to protect our product creation process with tooth and claw to prevent becoming a feature factory.
