The 3 Principles Agile Leaders Should Live By During An Organizational Transformation
Today’s Agile leaders manage with a more complete arsenal of skills and techniques than leaders of the past who led fundamentally different teams. For Agile organizations, the days of top-down hierarchy and autonomous decision making have joined the floppy disk as obsolete and outdated concepts in modern business. Leaders still can be effective without following […]
Do I Have What It Takes To Lead An Agile Transformation? Top 3 Skills Of A Modern Agile Leader
In their 2016 article “Embracing Agile”, the Harvard Business Review points out that while leadership may vocally state their support of an Agile transformation and may even be the original champion, leadership misconceptions about what it takes to implement Agile often present huge challenges down the road. It states, “[Leaders] unwittingly continue to manage in […]
Is Your Organization Equipped With the Right Talent and Expertise to Become Agile?
“I cannot say whether things will get better if we change; what I can say is they must change if we are to get better.” — Georg C. Lichtenberg, German Philosopher and Physicist If your organization is just starting out on the Agile journey, alignment to Agile business initiatives is the first stage in the […]
Will Agile Deliver? Getting Your Peers On Board With Your Agile Transformation
It takes a village to make an Agile transformation successful in any company. Leaders who’ve decided to implement Agile often find they need data and success stories they can offer their peers so the entire leadership team understands, supports, and feels confident in the decision to transform. The following are talking points for you to […]
Why we don’t re-estimate story points
To estimate or not? To re-estimate or not? This short article will tackle the second question. We’ll weigh in on #EstimateGate in a later blog post. Most teams are tempted to re-estimate stories once the Sprint has begun; as teams put fingers to keyboard, it is natural that they learn more about what is […]
What does a ScrumMaster Do Anyway?
We’ve discussed what a ScrumMaster is and what their main responsibilities are. We’ve even discussed the hard and soft skills needed to make a successful ScrumMaster (thanks, Leslie Knope). But, still, what does a ScrumMaster do anyway? What makes up an entire work day? How does their day (and their effectiveness) change as they engage […]
Keeping Your Millennial Job-Hoppers: Improving Employee Retention Among Software Developers
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the projected growth of employment opportunities for Software Developers from 2016 to 2026 is 24 percent. When you consider that the average growth rate for all occupations is 7 percent, you begin to realize that software development as an industry is growing much faster than other industries—meaning developers […]
The MMF: Minimum Marketable Feature
Welcome to the final installment of our MVP, PSI, MMF Alphabet series. For this article, we’re digging into MMF (Minimum Marketable Feature). The MMF Something I try to help new Product Owners with is understanding the distinction between Potentially Shippable and “We actually want to ship this”. There’s a tension that exists between the desire […]
The PSI: Potentially Shippable Increment
For the second installment of our MVP, MMF, PSI Alphabet Soup series, we’re going to tackle the PSI (Potentially Shippable Increment) also known as PSPI (Potentially Shippable Product Increment). The PSI Where I try to start with Product Owners when I’m coaching them is the idea of the PSI (Potentially Shippable Increment). At the end […]
MVP, MMF, PSI, WTF? Part One: Understanding the MVP
When I’m working with new Product Owners, I frequently find that we get caught up in a sea of TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms) when it comes time to actually start turning their Backlog of ideas into releasable increments of value. The idea of breaking work down – breaking down our Large, Planned Out product releases […]