I’ve been pulled into many emergency war rooms to kickoff last-ditch efforts to save failing projects. It’s heartbreaking to watch. Leaders in the room try hard to believe there’s hope to remedy the crisis. They sell a “great opportunity” to those tasked to fight the enemy. The technical team looks around in disbelief…they’ll have to … More Setting projects on fire

If you’re in the market to improve your company’s ability to delight customers or looking to reduce the time it takes to get new product enhancements to your customer, you’re probably asking about ‘agile’. If you have quality problems that constantly delay releases, you’re probably looking to be ‘agile’. If you’ve noticed that all the … More You can’t buy agile like a diet pill

Ever heard of Water-Scrum-Fall? Ever heard someone in a product development group tell you “they use a hybrid-agile approach”? There’s a million ways people continue using a traditional, phase gated, software development lifecycle approach and marry it with an agile framework or methodology. They’ll put familiar labels on meetings to get some of the benefits. They … More Use Waterfall to be agile

Few talk about being agile without using an agile framework, but yes, you can be. Its quite simple… in theory. To be agile is to be nimble, quick on your feet…to be responsive to change. Don’t believe me? Google the word ‘Agile’. And by the way, there’s more than one way to cook an egg. … More Software development doesn’t own ‘Agile’. How you can be agile too.

How a company spends its money has an effect on its ability to deliver. That’s obvious, right?  What I really mean is that a company needs to consider a change responsiveness strategy before making a decision on how to spend its money. Pause and think for a moment; how much are you willing to spend to … More Efficiency is a waste

When first studying Karate, you spend considerable time working on the basics. You will be taught to block, punch, kick, fall, and so forth. You perform the most basic activities over and over again. You stretch, do pushups, and other exercises to build flexibility and strength. Your instructor will walk around the dojo and give … More To build an agile organization, take Karate

The profession of Agile Coaching is dead according to Mariya Breyter in her talk at Big Apple Scrum Day 2015. She says there are currently too many people with too few skills acting as Agile Coaches and leaving members of the industry hiring anyone who has ‘Scrum Master’ on their resume as an agile coach. … More Stop saying ‘agile’