Illustrated Agile
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. […]
The Center for Nonverbal Studies has a fascinating webpage called The Nonverbal Dictionary of Gestures, Signs, and Body Language Cues. While coaching teams, I recently began to intentionally look for many of these gestures and it is interesting to see how often these gestures and cues reveal what people would really want to say or […]
A friend of mine shared a negative experience he recently had with their boss. I won’t get into details of this specific incident but it sounded like this was one in a string of behaviors in which he was left feeling, in his words, “totally unimportant.” The dictionary says we know something is important when […]
In the post, “Working on a Beating Heart“, we discussed the challenge of improving culture and fixing processes while continuing to deliver value to customers. As organizations attempt to move quickly to improve their workplace and remain nimble, competitive, and viable, there is danger in introducing too much change or in introducing change too fast. […]