Food for Agile Thought’s issue #147—shared with 17,882 peers—addresses business agility and what is required to make it happen. We learn that merely scaling ‘agile’ is not the path as business agility also needs changes of a different nature. Overcoming the traditional budgeting process, for example.
Speaking of which, Steve Denning contributes ten axioms that make traditional managers anxious; ridiculing ‘agile’ is no longer an option to deal with it.
Lastly, we borrow six tips to handle demanding stakeholders without burning bridges, and we learn which low-hanging fruits to pick to make an excellent first impression as a newly hired product manager.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #146—shared with 17,791 peers—addresses finding agile metrics, how to play the product game safe and lose, and why BDD is an integral part of business agility.
We also ask yourselves: Should an agile coach rather be an organizational psychotherapist? Or what are you doing all day if you’re supporting a single team as a scrum master?
Lastly, our gut feeling is confirmed that innovation does not happen under pressure as well as that ‘saying yes’ is not scaling technique to build successful products. (Fortunately, there are also six ways how to accomplish growth without trying to be everybody’s darling.)
Webinar Sprint Planning: The purpose of Scrum’s sprint planning is to align the development team and the product owner. Both need to agree on the shippable product increment of the next sprint. The idea is that the development team’s forecast reflects the product owner’s sprint goal. Also, the team needs to come up with a plan on how to accomplish its forecast.
Easier said than done, it appears. Therefore, the fifth Hands-on Agile webinar addresses common sprint planning anti-patterns. Learn how to keep a simple scrum ceremony useful by avoiding typical mistakes, from pushy POs, toying with the definition of ready to obstructing the future flow by pushing utilization to 110%.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #145—shared with 17,732 peers—addresses how to make agile work for you, how graphics can massively improve your facilitation skills, and how you can identify friends and foes with an organizational design analysis.
We also get a better understanding of Kanban Cadences, how to sell and prioritize non-feature work such as refactoring, and why merely shipping code does not mean you understand the philosophy of Kaizen.
Lastly, learn new tips and trick on how to deal with HIPPOs and their pet projects in your organization.
Learn how to create whiteboards: Whiteboards are magic as they support foundational agile principles such as interaction, collaboration, face-to-face communication, or transparency. They facilitate adapting to change, continuous improvement, and the self-organization of the team. You can create meaningful software with a few index cards, pins (or magnets), pencils, and drywall—you do not need Jira or any other agile process management tool.
Food for Agile Thought’s issue #144—shared with 17,591 peers—covers Mary Meeker’s epic report on Internet trends 2018, the background on why and how Amazon figured out the benefits of Amazon Prime, and why smart organizations leave the decision making to those closest to a problem.
We also appreciate Setapp’s detailed process to run product-/market fit analyses, and we learn why improving flow is the Swiss Army knife to solving all kind of issues.
Lastly, Leon Tranter makes a compelling pitch to dare more Kanban, and yes, running experiments will reduce output — if you ignore flow basics in the process.
