Food for Agile Thought #151: Beyond Budgeting, Open Workspace Horror, Product Vision Principles, #mtpcon SF

Food for Agile Thought’s issue #151—shared with 18,292 peers—focuses on beyond budgeting and the emerging business agility trend. We also learn about a study that provides scientific proof for a familiar gut feeling among knowledge workers: open floor plans suck.

We then take a deep dive into product vision principles and why you should look beyond MMRs to differentiators if you want your product to succeed.

Finally, the results of the scrum master survey are in, delivering a benchmark for the all-important question: scrum master, whatchadoing all day?

Have a great week!

Food for Agile Thought #151: Beyond Budgeting, Open Workspace Horror, Product Vision Principles, #mtpcon SF

🏆 The Tip of the Week

Bjarte Bogsnes (via Corporate Rebels): Beyond Budgeting — The Adaptive And Agile Management Model

Bjarte Bogsnes introduces the principles of Beyond Budgeting and explains why ‘Business Agility’ finally has become a trend.

Agile & Scrum

(via Royal Society Publishing): The impact of the ‘open’ workspace on human collaboration

Ethan S. Bernstein and Stephen Turban report on the findings of a recent study on the usefulness of ‘open’ workspaces for knowledge workers.

In short, rather than prompting increasingly vibrant face-to-face collaboration, open architecture appeared to trigger a natural human response to socially withdraw from officemates and interact instead over email and IM.

John Cutler (via Medium): #Why[Some Tool]

John Cutler on the tool question, the often resulting reflexes within an organization, its business value and Beyond Budgeting.

Paul Hobcraft: Cynefin: A framework that grows for me all the time in its value and worth.

Paul Hobcraft explains the basic idea of the Cynefin framework and how it has proven to be useful when dealing with innovation and complexity.


Advertisement

Let people & teams shine — Join us to shape the agile evolution!

relayr has become Europe’s leading platform for the Industrial Internet of Things and is looking for an Agile Coach / People Developer (m/f) for our Berlin office who equally cares about people development and agile team focus in a complex environment.

We believe, aiming for the next step in our agile evolvement comes from direct coaching of people to help them to embrace their skills towards better judgement and cooperation in teams and towards others in our rapidly growing organisation.

Relayr Is Looking for an Agile Coach in Berlin — Food for Agile Thought

Apply now: Let people & teams shine — Join us and shape the agile evolution!

If you are interested in advertising in the Food for Agile Thought newsletter, please contact me.


Product & Lean

Emily Tate (via Mind The Product): What we Learned at #mtpcon San Francisco 2018

Emily Tate summarizes the learnings from the recent #mtpcon San Francisco, from embracing the awkward to the Product Practitioner Oath.

Tomasz Tunguz: Why Your Startup Doesn't Invest Sufficiently in its Differentiators

Tomasz Tunguz reflects on minimum market requirements (MMR), neutralizers, and differentiators as integral parts of a product strategy.

📯 Yo Scrum Master, Whatchadoing all Day?

Scrum Master Duties: supposedly, a great scrum master serves only one scrum team — that’s at least a popular narrative in the scrum community. Nevertheless, there is also a loud voice that doubts that approach: what would you do the whole day – with a single team? Aren’t they supposed to become self-organizing over time? And if so, does the scrum then need a scrum master 24/7?

As I worked for years as a product owner on scrum teams without a dedicated scrum master-which was working well-I was curious to learn more about that question, too. Hence I ran a survey in late June and early July 2018, the results of which are presented here.

In total, 261 scrum masters participated in this non-representative survey in the two weeks before July 5th, 2018. 19 participants chose not to provide their consent to Google processing and to store their answers. Hence their contributions were deleted, resulting in a sample size of 242 responses.

Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team (Survey Results) — Age of Product

Read More: Scrum Master Duties, Serving a Single Team (Survey Results).

📺 Join 1,300-plus Agile Peers on Youtube

Now available on the Age of Product Youtube channel:

✋ Do Not Miss Out: Join the 5,125-plus Strong ‘Hands-on Agile’ Slack Team

I invite you to join the “Hands-on Agile” Slack team and enjoy the benefits of a fast-growing, vibrant community of agile practitioners from around the world.

Large scale agile: Join the Hands-on Agile Slack Group

If you like to join now all you have to do now is provide your credentials via this Google form, and I will sign you up. By the way, it’s free.

Scrum Master Interview Question: free download of the most popular ebook on Scrum Master job interviews — by Age-of-Product

🗞️ Last Week’s Food for Agile Thought Edition

Read more: Food for Agile Thought #150: The Agile Manager, Changing Culture, Product Prioritization.

Find this content useful? Share it with your friends!