In the agile community, most agile practitioners just repeat, hey you need to have full self-organized, self-direct agile teams, you should delegate all decisions to teams, they should make all decisions about the market and … And start to blame leaders. I was wondering who should care about readiness and the possibility of a change?
In the agile fluency model, we call this type of teams “fluent in Optimizing zone”. Fluent Optimizing teams understand what their market wants, what the business needs, and how to meet those needs. Or, as in a startup environment, they know what they need to…
Simin was a very successful Scrum Master in the previous company, She decided to enter a new company after two years to gain new experiences. The manager who hired her, asked her, “Our team is so frustrated today and they don’t have any discipline, and I’m asking you to organize the planning, meetings, and process of the team…” She had a lot of energy, and she tried to make it happen from day one. She tried to facilitate various meetings, and …. But after a while, she felt that the team was not accepted her presence and she was completely…
In my last 10 years’ experiences, one of the buzzwords in the agile community was the self-organized teams. everyone talks about it but no one knows how to create one.
It’s all about decision making
All teams face two types of issues, decision making, and execution. When a team is not self-organized, somebody(that we call it manager) makes all decisions and the team just executes them. Whenever we want to create a self-organized team, we should delegate part of or all of these decisions to the team.
It’s all about delegating
Management and leadership books talk about delegating authority. But if you have the experience of managing even a…
This month, I helped a scrum team to transform their planning and collaboration way, the way of working of different skills together as a team. I want to tell their story here and how we solved one of their tough challenges.
Problem:
Almost 9 years ago, when I started my first scrum mastery role, I encountered one of my tough challenges, conflict resolution. Two members of the development team(Ali and Vahid) separately told me, we can not work together anymore.
- “Why do you think you can no longer work with him? “ I asked them.
- Ali: “He doesn’t respect me… he is a brilliant jerk… I could not be able to work with him anymore”.
- “Ali is not a good team member, he is so lazy, and he does not care about the team… I don’t like to work with him… “…
Dev Team: “Hey Mike (Scrum Master), We have lots of unplanned work during the last sprints, How we should handle them?”
Mike: “You can create a buffer space in your sprint plan”
Dev Team: “It looks great... Let’s do it”
What is buffer space?
Based on this story, During sprint plannings reserve some buffer in a sprint backlog. There are two ways to do this. First, you can plan a virtual backlog item of a certain size that will count towards your velocity. This is going to be your buffer. Each time a new user story or bug enters the sprint, you subtract its…
In my last post, I mentioned that I started a new agile transformation journey with a new company. I presented a visualized version of Agile fluency model that helped me on my journey. In this post, I would like to share my facilitation story with my stakeholders.
1- Help them to imagine a shared vision
Perhaps the most important thing in an agile transformation is to create a shared vision. Where do we want to go? Where is the destination؟ A shared vision will make people work together to achieve that vision, despite all the conflicts.
Two weeks ago, I started a new agile transformation journey with a new company. They have several cross-functional teams. Like everywhere else, they asked me to make them agile in 3 months :)
So, I tried to use the Agile Fluency Model to help my main stakeholders to see what kind of agile investments their organization needs to make. Insufficient investment not only leads to slow progress, but it also creates lasting cynicism and resentment.
In order to achieve my goal, I tried to use a series of images. …
After more than 20 years of Agile movement, many organizations have not yet achieved the agile promises.
Why? Because many agile practitioners have sought to implement different frameworks, and have defined their success metrics for implementing these frameworks or methods.
Buzzword-centric Transformation
“We want to implement OKR”, “We want to implement Scrum”, “We want to adopt agile”. So, We hire a buzzword-coach, Trainer and she will teach us how to do this. And people will show resistance against the buzzword. She is trying to sell her service to companies.
This kind of change programs is buzzword centric. Agile mindset helped us to create “Customer-centric” products, but why we define a change program “buzzword-centric”?
It is time to go back to the promises of agility and define a change plan based on results and outcomes.
Yaya, It’s the third part of the practical agile transformation framework that we call it Factful Agility Framework. In the first part we created a shared change vision, in the second part we understood the current condition and chosen some meaningful metrics.
In the last part, we will exploit the change program by conducting experiments.
Why do we call it experiments?
We are factful, so we should make decisions based on facts. There are 3 facts here:
1- We have a shared change vision, So we know the direction.
2- We assessed the current situation, So we know the current conditions.
3- We have some hypotheses…
