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.
At the beginning of the past two years I have written posts with a few suggestions for Scrum Masters to target for their own development resolutions. You can take a look at them here: 2012 2013 For 2014, here are a few more resolutions to consider as you continue your personal mastery of the role. Relinquish […]
Thank you to all of the Illustrated Agile readers who made 2013 so awesome. The reason Illustrated Agile exists is to encourage you in your journey as a change agent and for you to become a catalyst for introducing agility concepts and practices into your organization. I’m looking forward to continuing the journey with all […]
In Part 1, we discussed a few of the reason why current performance management systems may be flawed and are contributing to the employee disengagement epidemic facing many organizations today. So, if what we have isn’t resonating with many of our people – if it is not inspiring greater performance and engagement – what are […]
It’s that time of year again…performance management review season. The topic of performance management seems to be in the spotlight more than usual with recent news from Yahoo! and Microsoft. For many of the early years in my career I was an independent consultant but in 2004 I joined a large company as an employee. […]
I recently watched a documentary about Norman Foster, an architect responsible for designing a wide array of stunning structures such as the Millau Viaduct in France, the Swiss Re Headquarters in London, and the Hearst Tower in New York. The title of the documentary comes from a question raised by his mentor, Buckminster Fuller, early […]
Welcome to resistance…the tension is here. – Switchfoot (from the song “Dare You To Move”) If you are attempting to bring meaningful change into your organization through a transformation initiative (such as introducing Agile or something similar), you will meet resistance. Guaranteed. Your resistance may be a vocal cynic, the skeptical leader, a demoralized workforce, […]
In two previous posts, When Developers and Testers Collide and Defending Your Position, we discussed the challenge Agile teams may have when shifting testing activities from a period of time after development is finished to become a collaborative activity occurring as close to the point of development as possible while the team is working in […]
In Peter Senge’s book, “The Fifth Discipline”, he mentions seven learning disabilities often going undetected in organizations. One of these learning disabilities is the tendency for people to identify themselves with their position. Mr. Senge calls this the “I am my position” learning disability and states: When people in organizations focus only on their position, […]
The success or failure of leaders are often measured with quantifiable metrics – stock price, shareholder value, revenue, expenses, sales, profit – to name a few. In a capitalistic system, focusing on results-based metrics are an important dimension to remaining a viable enterprise… …but something seems to be missing. While preparing for a presentation later this […]
The Sprint Review session should be a time at the end of every sprint for the team to inspect their work, receive feedback within the team and with stakeholders, and to decide what to do next. This should be done in an informal setting and become a natural ritual for the team. Many articles have […]
One of the pleasures of what I do is having a front row seat for the adventure people experience as they form and grow into incredible teams. While working with these teams, I am often reminded of a technique groups of mountain climbers will often use. When navigating glacier routes prone to crevices, climbers will […]
As more and more organizations begin to shift to Agile practices many existing Project Managers are making the transition to become a Scrum Master or Agile Project Manager. I have seen many people make this move seamlessly and are doing quite well while there are some who find the new role a little more challenging. […]