I have to admit that I’m quite the American Football fan. Growing up in Pennsylvania, my team was the Philadelphia Eagles. If you know anything about them, you know that they have a relatively “vigorous and unrelentingly positive” fanbase.  https://www.facebook.com/UKGridiron/videos/snowballing-santa_15-december/743806219452545/ But then years ago, I moved to the New York tri-state area and became a fan of the NY Giants. I root for those two teams during the season unless they’re playing each other, then I root for the Eagles. But let’s move it along a bit… Are you playing Football? While ..read more

AGILE COACHING COMMUNITY OF PRACTICE OR CENTERS OF EXCELLENCE PARTNERSHIP PROGRAM Agile Coaching in the world of Business Agility can be a uniquely challenging space. One of those challenge areas is with your Agile Coaching Communities of Practice. A group encompassing your Agile Coach and Scrum Master teams that encourages their ongoing collaboration, learning, and growth. It can be a centerpiece of your overall impact and value proposition or another boring group meeting. Bob Galen is the author of Extraordinarily Badass Agile Coaching. He’s an accomplished coach with a long history of coach ..read more

My colleague and friend Julee Everett is an incredible agile leader and coach. I met her quite a few years ago, and we’ve continued to stay in touch, influencing one another. Recently, she wrote an article entitled— How We Built a Global Bad-Ass Coaching Community: 5 C’s to Drive Powerful Coaching Outcomes and Scale a Coach Community on Medium. I just read it, and I think it’s a great case study into some of the critical steps in setting up an Agile Coaching Community of Practice, not in a theoretical or academic sense, but in a real-world sense. You’ll notice that Julee references my Extraord ..read more

I saw this dialogue on LinkedIn recently and thought I’d share a part of it— From David O’Connor I have been looking for a job as an Agile coach or even as a Scrum Master for a while now with little success. It appears that companies want Technical program managers or Delivery managers or Project managers instead. Sometimes they prefix the word "Agile" to these titles. My sense is that the change agent or coach aspect of Scrum Masters and Agile coaches is no longer desirable by most businesses. What do you think? A significant stream of comments and reactions to David’s post are worth a read ..read more

I saw a post the other day on LinkedIn where someone made the case on how to show value as Agile coaches, consultants, trainers, and leaders.  The article was very math-focused, basically boiling everything down to the following— Value = (The benefits a client/customer/leader receives – Total cost of ownership) Then, they provided some value ROI calculations for various roles. All in all, it was a nice, tight argument. The numbers were precise, and the conclusions were compelling. The numbers don’t lie We’ve all heard this argument or position when folks are speaking about organizationa ..read more

The Scrum Alliance and the Business Agility Institute partnered on a client survey focused on—Skills in the New World of Work released in October 2023. You can get a copy of the report here.  As a follow-up to the last article I shared on this topic, I thought I’d share something that Jesse Fewell wrote reacting to it. His reaction was posted on the Scrum Alliance blog, supporting the report. In it, Jesse highlights three fundamental pivots that agilists should be considering based on the report’s findings. I’ll share my thoughts on each pivot next. Pivot #1 – Broadcast your bottom-line i ..read more

The Scrum Alliance and the Business Agility Institute partnered on a client survey focused toward—Skills in the New World of Work that was released in October 2023. You can get a copy of the report here.  The key question on the cover – Which agile skills are most in demand in today’s workforce? But on page #20, the key question is reframed to – Which skills are most in demand in today’s workforce? While the questions are close, I’m imagining the “agile” drove most of the respondent thinking. I would encourage everyone to read it, as it contains some interesting findings and insights. Tha ..read more

Heath Nichols wrote a wonderful post entitled—Great Teams Don’t Grow on Trees.   It reminded me of the importance of investing in your agile teams, trusting and empowering them, and the need to never take them for granted. In other words, it’s about the team, Stupid! I’ve written a couple of posts surrounding the topic as well— https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2015/3/30/building-agile-teams-a-primer-for-organizational-leaders https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2016/5/22/its-about-the-agile-team-stupid https://rgalen.com/agile-training-news/2017/2/12/elastic-teams https ..read more

I was in one of our Moose Herd sessions the other day and one of the Moose (or is it Meese) brought up a scenario around impediments. The topic was—how to encourage (inspire, make) the team take ownership of resolving their impediments. The question elicited a wonderful Herd discussion that felt like it helped the questioner. But as it went on, I began to remember that I’d historically formed a view of 4-Types of Impediments that I hadn’t thought about in a long time or articulated. Thus, this post. 4-Types of Agile Impediments The first thing is that there might be more than four that some of ..read more

To be honest, I’ve been aware of and admiring Peter Merel and his work for quite some time—perhaps more than 10 years. That said, I haven’t been a consistent follower, and as I re-reviewed the Descaling Manifesto, he proposes within the XSCALE Alliance, I realized the great work he’s been doing in the agile community. Purposeful and vital work that strikes at the heart of a truly agile mindset and better ways of leading, organizing, and working. My purpose in writing this post is to acquaint you with Peter, the alliance, and the manifesto. It also encourages you to do a deep dive into everythi ..read more