Illustrated AgileLen Lagestee is an organizational change coach and blogger at www.illustratedagile.com. As a coach, Len is interacting with large organizations to connect people, revolutionize leadership, deliver results, and humanize the workforce.
I am drawn to watching the Tour de France every year and I’m already looking forward to the event starting this weekend. There is just something about watching people test their physical limits every day in such a beautiful yet challenging environment. I have learned a little about the dynamics of a cycling team and it’s […]
Leaders are tempted to decide on organizational or workflow changes and reveal them with a “big bang.” The reveal will often include a new org chart with the instructions that we’ll figure out the details later. As organizations grow larger and more complex, the success of implementing change in this way becomes questionable. At the […]
While writing my earlier post about Coaching Pull, I started to use a mountain climbing analogy but after a few edits it just didn’t seem to fit. But it did get me thinking… Having personally climbed a large mountain (or two) and being active in organizational change initiatives, it seems to me there are some […]
An important dynamic of becoming a fluid and well-functioning Scrum team is when team members are continuously pulling. As opposed to being pushed or waiting to be pushed, the team is in constant motion, pulling from a queue of features that should deliver value to customers. The product owner establishes the queue of features by […]
Hiring a Scrum Master? Interviewing a Scrum Master? Here are 28 interview questions or scenarios to consider: Phone Interview Questions I would use these questions to quickly determine if a candidate has a base understanding of Scrum and should be brought in for in-person interviews. In two minutes or so and at a high level, describe […]
One of the attributes of a healthy Agile organization are teams being in a state of flow. You can easily tell when a team is in flow. There is a sense of purpose and vision, there is very little stress, there is laughter and comraderie. They are committed to each other, and when a challenge […]
I believe retrospectives can be a powerful component to building an organization focused on agility and continuous improvement. But beyond asking what we can do better and what we should stop doing, the retrospective can also become a time of acknowledgment and an oasis in an otherwise stressful and demanding world. First, the retrospective can […]
Leadership is hard and the leadership journey is littered with many lessons learned along the way. While its obvious leaders are human and will always make mistakes, leadership behavior will always have a direct impact on the well-being and satisfaction of the people they are privileged to lead. It’s been said people don’t leave organizations, they leave […]
As we continue our Agility transformation, we have been establishing how our leadership teams will engage with our product teams now that we have become an Agile organization. We have focused primarily on when and how organizational vision is created by senior leadership and how that vision is translated to our product teams with the […]
In an earlier post explaining our Agile Ecosystem, I mentioned the use of communities of practice as an integral part of an Agile organization. Well-functioning communities, with clear vision, autonomy, and focus, can become an important component in sustaining your transformation to Agility and the engine for continuous process improvement. Communities of practice are domain-based […]
One of my Scrum Masters used Retrospective Cookies from @weisbart this morning. These fortune cookies are made with thought-provoking questions inside and are delivered in a Chinese quart container. The dialog that ensued was vibrant and meaningful and having a little snack during the meeting doesn’t hurt either. Give them a try if your retrospectives […]
Meetings, meetings. I hear complaints about meetings just about every day including, believe it or not, Agile or Scrum meetings. Too many, too long, too boring, too many slides, too many people, too few people, and the most popular, uninterested meeting participants typing away with laptops or with mobile phones in hand. In thinking about […]