Food for Agile Thought’s issue #127—shared with 14,292 peers—covers useless agile metric; we learn common excuses why continuous delivery would not work, and how to organize a big room planning.
We then talk about signs of toxic team culture, how design thinking, agile and lean fit together, and what to do when a team fails to deliver at the end of a sprint.
Lastly, we learn why experiments do not just happen to the best organizations but perhaps create them, and what product thinking has to do with it.
Have a great week!
🏆 The Tip of the Week
: KPIs, Velocity, and Other Destructive Metrics
Allen Holub explains why a taylorist approach to agile practices is ill-fated.
Focus on continuous process improvement, and productivity takes care of itself.
Useless Agile Metrics & Scrum
(via Agile Testing Days): Continuous Delivery—Sounds Great But It Won't Work Here
Watch Jez Humble’s keynote from Agile Testing Day 2017—a handy list of excuses why CD supposedly would not work.
(via InfoQ): Scaling Agile – Big Room Planning
Ole Jepsen shares a comprehensive how-to of successfully scaling agile: aligning up to 100 people and figuring out what to build next in just two days.
: When Teams Don't Finish Work in a Sprint: 3 Tips to Seeing and Finishing Work
Johanna Rothman has three suggestions how to improve a team’s ability to accomplish the sprint goal.
📯 XSCALE Alliance News
The Business Agility Institute (BAI) and XSCALE Alliance are teaming up. While the BAI provides the most comprehensive and detailed taxonomy of agile organizations today, XSCALE’s principles and pattern languages offer an agnostic praxis to fulfill the BAI taxonomy.
Read More: XSCALE Alliance has agreed to a Memorandum of Understanding with Business Agility Institute.
Product & Lean
(via ThoughtWorks): Understanding how Design Thinking, Lean and Agile Work Together
Jonny Schneider fights cargo cult agile by detailing how the three mindsets of product development can be used successfully beyond formalized processes.
(via Hackernoon): We Need Fewer Product Managers
John Cutler makes a compelling case that we need more product thinking and less product managing.
📯 13 Signs of a Toxic Team Culture
What looked like a good idea back in the 1990ies—outsourcing, for example, software development as a non-essential business area—has meanwhile massively backfired for a lot of legacy organizations. And yet, they still do not understand what it takes to build a decent product/engineering culture. Learn more about typical anti-patterns and are signs that the organization has a toxic team culture.
Read More: 13 Signs of a Toxic Team Culture
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Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition
Read more: Food for Agile Thought #126: Agile Engineering, Swarming, Experimentation Culture, Metrics Fetish.