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I recently led a Scrum class whose members were already quite knowledgeable and experienced.  I did a retrospective of the first day of the class, and there were several stickies under the column entitled "Could be better" which were explicitly asking for less beginner theory and more stories and hands-on complex tools.  They were pleading for the advanced version from the trenches. I had very little time to throw something together, but I had a few ideas.  Fortunately, I was co-training this class with their coach, and he knew some of their pain points.  On day 2, we promised to give the class lots of "variant content" that could be used to conduct the meetings as an experiment, if the plain vanilla format of the Scrum meetings grew stale, and…

When transforming an entire enterprise it is nearly impossible to all of sudden instantaneously flip everything on its ear: the roles, processes, organizational structure and the mindsets of all the people that inhabit it.  From the outside looking in, there are many aspects of life that appear susceptible to instant metamorphosis.  Individual kernels of pop corn bursting open, photographic film exposed to sunlight, the illumination of a light bulb...all of them are commonplace to us. However, many changes happen so gradually, at such a small scale or large scale that our perception of them is that they are practically static and immutable.  Consider the pupa.  Though it contains dormant life, it does not move perceptibly to humans.  Indeed, we would not recognize that the contents of the cocoon are a…

Being a leader may not be the bed of roses we dreamed it would, from the outside looking in. Turns out, Leaders Eat Last, according to Simon Sinek in his popular book by the same name. To make matters worse for leaders, when it comes to doing something new or particularly challenging...in that case leaders go first. (Lucky you!) Somehow, it seems that most Agile Coaches didn't get the memo. There is a certain "coming of age" period approaching the Agile community.  It's an area where Agile Coaches and Trainers have been kicking the rock down the road for more than a decade now.  I could speculate why, but I won't.  Agile Coaches are going to have to start actually coaching the entire enterprise, not just the individuals and teams…

I just got a text, photo and phone call from a life-long friend in Omaha who attended a presentation by 2 "agilists" from a major global consulting firm in town. They were pushing SAFe hard, claiming it is certain to be the future of agile for the world.  After some mediocre steaks and bad wine (according to my buddy who is about to head up an agile team at a financial services firm) they went into their pitch, and when they bored the audience, or at least my friend (who at that point was going to set his napkin on fire just to stay awake) finally they took questions. "What will you do when the other directors and people in the company won't switch to agile?" No answers returned to…

I've wondered how long it would take, if I went to a new city, where I a total stranger, if I were to propose holding an Open Space Technology event, how long would it take for people to be open and engaged in doing something like that. Tonight I got my answer: about 120 days.   Now, the truth is it doesn't really take that long.   In retrospect, if I had acted before someone in my Lean Coffee Meetup Group (Audaciously Agile Conversations with Lean Coffee in Omaha) actually went to the trouble of sending me a written request to, then realistically, it would have only taken about 60 days.  I actually received an email asking me to please pause the 4 or 5 tables doing Lean Coffee synchronously,…

When I say "open space" in this context I am referring to taking the higher laws of Open Space Technology (rather than the mechanics per se of OST) and applying them to large teams, or multi-team program events where difficult coordination problems must be solved to handle the enormous complexity and risk of large scale agile approaches to product development. Because events of this scale have costs that scale with the number of participants, it behooves the sponsor to wrap them inside of all the elements of OST and Open Space Agility.  Namely, extend a written invitation to every person in the organization, with a well-crafted theme, providing ample advanced notice, create the appropriate "guard rails" and psychological safety to unlock the most enlightened, creative mind of each participant, and…

  Is agile transformation making your life miserable as an executive or member of upper level management? If not, you are a very fortunate person. About 80% of agile transformations fail, and a signatory of the agile manifesto, Alistair Cockburn, has been known to say that he hasn't seen a real, lasting successful agile transformation yet. Agile has been around, going by various names, such as Scrum, eXtreme Programming, or Kanban, for well over 20 years, and thousands of corporations of a variety of sizes have attempted to transform themselves into places where an agile mindset thrives, but to little or no avail. So why should you expect your company to be any different? If you do the same things as the rest of the crowd, you will most likely…

In late 2013, Jean Tabaka, Eric Willeke and Liz Keogh came up with the idea of a Community of Thinkers, with a statement about what that meant to them. Rather than post it centrally, they each posted it individually, and encouraged others to copy and paste if they agreed and supported the notion. We support this vision of community: “A Community of Thinkers” I am a member of a community of thinkers. I believe that communities exist as homes for professionals to learn, teach, and reflect on their work. I challenge each community in the software industry to: reflect and honor the practitioners who make its existence possible; provide an excellent experience for its members; support the excellent experience its members provide for their clients and colleagues in all aspects…

Lean Agile is not just about letting small teams doing whatever they want.  I work with large organizations that have dozens, hundreds or thousands of teams of software developers that are building, maintaining or replacing a part of a very complex digital system at any given time. There is no possible way that a small team of less than 9 people could do their work with the same or better results in terms of features, availability, resilience, performance or scalability, as the huge array of teams that are accomplishing this grand scale of work today. In each case, several agile coaches who are engaged with the client and familiar with the situation all agree, this level of complexity in a system requires many teams to create and upkeep. So, even…

Once upon a time, there was a Colonel who served his country in Omaha, Nebraska in Air Force Weather. There were lots of different kinds of projects that were going on between the military and some of it's defense vendors. Much like NASA and other kinds of large scale system development "missions" that we're familiar with in the civilian world, this arm of the military was using a traditional, phase-gated, sequential, large batch approach to organizing the work, sometimes referred to as "waterfall" and everything was fine with that until it wasn't. Too many projects were just taking too long to finish, if ever, and they were too frequently over-budget, or perhaps quality was lacking, or maybe just the scope of requirements seemed excessive, or some combination of these flaws…