Let’s begin by agreeing that the quest for success starts with the right approach to support project delivery. As a practitioner in the project, program & portfolio management space for many years now, I have seen different delivery approaches work for different organizations based on project characteristics and organizational needs. Each project need will have a spot on the continuum, from the predictive waterfall approach to an Agile approach. Meanwhile most of the practitioners I interact with seem to have chosen a side – there are some strong believers of waterfall that stresses meticu ..read more

Compliance is a necessary cost that businesses have to accept. After all, it is meant for the good of your business as well as your stakeholders. However, one aspect that makes most startups and established enterprises fear compliance is the price tag it comes with. Even worse, businesses need to comply with more than one regulation, not to mention their own internal policies. While you will still have to pay the cost of compliance and use the ad hoc resources, the method by which you approach compliance will have a significant role to play on the quality of compliance as well as the cost. Unl ..read more

Does your organization have a meeting-driven culture? Not sure? Ask yourself how much time you spend in meetings. Are they effective? Search the Internet and you’ll discover that we spend way more time in meetings than we’re comfortable admitting. The Harvard Business Review claims that the figure has doubled in the last 50 years. The designers of Scrum recognized this and deliberately kept the formal meetings to the bare minimum. It adds up to around 12-15% if you use the entire time box. Contrast this amount to many organizations and you will discover that Scrum is quite effic ..read more

Preamble Is there such a thing as a perfect Scrum Master? Likely not, because of course we are all human and not perfect beings. However, we can make a case for skills that contribute to becoming a perfect Scrum Master. In 2017, Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland updated the Scrum Values document, and in a video that same year discussed the changes they were making. They talked at length about the Scrum Master role. To quote Ken Schwaber, “It’s a very tough job”. The 2018 new Scrum Guide states:“The Scrum Master is responsible for promoting and supporting Scrum as defined in the Scrum Guide”. I ..read more

I recently had a scheduled call with a client that was aimed to level-set expectations around some upcoming Agile Consultation work that I’d booked. The work was specifically to help them visualize and build their workflow. I had my Sales Engineer come with me, as we both had the suspicion that the client had also bought a tool on the promise it would help them become more Agile. Becoming “Agile” is not about a tool, just like visualizing and building workflow isn’t about setting up a Kanban Board. Being “Agile” is about the people and their interactions. I’ve seen this a number of times, wher ..read more

I like to get to the heart of things – their source. Therefore, I love the Agile Manifesto when trying to understand all things agile. http://agilemanigesto.org The Manifesto is an ideological, philosophical paper outlining the 4 values and 12 principles of how to manage your tasks (in IT but elsewhere, too) and work with your colleagues in an agile manner.  It is not Scrum or Kanban or SAFe – those are wonderful tools. However, it is the Manifesto that clarifies what it actually means to be agile. Like many of you, I have learned and received certifications – in Scrum, Product Own ..read more

As a technical agile coach and trainer, I help teams discover ways of testing. Some teams ignore tests altogether, while others write every possible test possible, wasting valuable time and not being able to deliver at a good pace. My first question is always this: How much does the customer pay for tests? Nothing. That’s right! Not a dime. I don’t even ship my product to them with any tests. They aren’t even compiled into bytecode for them. They are not going to pick up my application and open a debugger to make sure I’ve written tests that pass. They don’t care how many tests I’ve written or ..read more

To understand why so many people around the world have adopted Agile as their first and foremost guide to improvement, we must first look at why leadership has been failing us in the first place. Leadership, in the modern world, has been equated to a highly visible role, a spokesperson whose suave charisma is infectious, and following their mantra is made easy. No one can deny that they are not impressed when a sharply dressed leader bounds onto the stage at a conference and proceeds to use impressive statistics to back up his or her claims that ‘if we just did this, then the world would be a ..read more

(Image: Cover image of the book Essential Kanban Condensed by David J. Anderson and Andy Carmichael.) Many people I interact with seem to believe that Kanban is another Agile methodology for helping Agile teams manage their work. The aim of this post is to help people see how Kanban can be so much more. I am aware that there are some who believe that a high performing, self-organizing, cross-functional Agile team is as good as it gets and that it is the job of Leadership to change the organization such that this kind of team becomes a reality. This is a belief that I also held for many ye ..read more

Most people would rather be wrong than uncertain. When the prospect of being right is questionable, human beings would rather commit to a position and be wrong, rather than hold a posture of uncertainty and avoid commitment altogether. Our order of preference is: #1 – to be right, #2 – to be wrong, and #3 – to remain uncertain. Why #’s 1 and 2? Because we are addicted to the false sense of security that commitments give us. Organizations that are part of a domain where uncertainty is high, such as knowledge work or professional services, pay a heavy price if they take a sim ..read more