Supposedly, becoming agile is a journey, not a destination. This is a convenient narrative if the viability of your consultancy depends on selling men and materiel. The fuzzier the objective of an agile transition the less likely there will be an agile audit addressing the return on investment question the customer might have.
Moreover, a fuzzy objective such as ‘we want to become an agile organization’ is probably the reason for applying the same methodologies indiscriminately to every organization—a one size fits all approach for agile transitions.
However, what if not every organization embarking on a transition to agile practices is meant to become a teal organization or a holacracy? What if being late to the agile transition party is instead a deliberate choice than a manifestation of hubris, ignorance or leadership failure?
Read more on why feedback loops in the form of an agile audit are beneficial for organizations and teams alike.
TL;DR: Use Burn-Down Charts to Discover Scrum Anti-Patterns
A burn-down chart tracks the progress of a team toward a goal by visualizing the remaining work in comparison to the available time. So far, so good. More interesting than reporting a status, however, is the fact that burn-down charts also visualize Scrum anti-patterns of a team or its organization.
Learn more about discovering these anti-patterns that can range from systemic issues like queues outside a team’s sphere of influence and other organizational debt to a team’s fluency in agile practices.
TL;DR: How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams
Is every organization suited to become ‘agile?’ If so: How to measure agility? And if not: Wouldn’t it be great figuring that out before embarking on a futile and expensive journey?
On February 3rd, 2018, 20-plus people will join a hackathon to build an agility assessment framework based on this taxonomy. The goal of the workshop is to provide the first version of a tool that empowers agile practitioners to measure agility, be it an organization’s suitability for agile practices or a team’s progress on its path to becoming agile.
After rebuilding an existing application on a new tech stack within time and under budget our team had an overall retrospective with stakeholders this week to identify systemic issues. We found more than 20 problems in total and derived eight detailed recommendations the organization will need to address when moving forward to the next level of agile product creation.
Read on and learn how we achieved this result in under two hours with an overall retrospective attended by 16 people.
Do you remember the good old days when the organization started with its first Scrum team? And the new engineering kid on the block was “merely” supposed to deliver a potentially shippable product increment at the end of a sprint? When no one thought about how to align scrum teams?
The first team was to sound the bell for the upcoming change towards a learning organization. Little did we know back then about the challenges along that route. When teams 2, 3 and 4 joined, shipping a product increment at the end of a sprint became first complicated, and then complex.
It turns out that becoming agile does not only required to create (Scrum) teams. Reaping the full benefits of becoming agile, of becoming a learning organization built around software also requires changing engineering practices. Nowadays, it is all about continuous value delivery.
TL; DR: Agile Workspace Means Choice Among a Diversity of Spaces
If you want your organization to become agile, adding more whiteboards to the workspace will not suffice. You have to abandon the idea that the workspace is an assembly line for white-collar workers. You need to let go Taylorism. We are now in the age of the creative worker.
To become agile – and reap its benefits such as becoming more innovative –, you need a diversity of workspaces to support all forms of creative work: focus, collaborate, learn, and socialize. Also, you have to let your creative workers choose which space is best suited for a task.
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