February 4, 2012

BigVisible Blog

If You Want To Stop Becoming More Agile, Start Focusing on Standards

Change is difficult.  Improving is difficult.   Many managers see improvement and change as temporary things that cause confusion and misdirection until a steady state is achieved and the improvement is completed. They approach change with a model of “unfreeze – change – refreeze”.  Only when things are frozen again – a standard established, a checklist and diagram provided – will workers know what to do, and will it be safe to “roll out” changes to others.

This way of thinking and approach to change may drastically limit the success of your journey to becoming an agile organization.

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Zero to Agile in 3-5 Years…It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint

Sean Buck of Capital Group and I did a talk at Agile2011 on the topic of organizational transformation – how a true agile transformation is holistic – it involves the entire company – and  takes a long time – months and years in most large organizations.  The deck is attached below.  It may be tough to get the main points without the narration, so we are considering doing a webinar version.  Post a comment if you are interested in this.

0-To-Agile-In-3-5Years

Some of the main points: [Read more...]

Too Many Meetings? Don’t Go!

I often hear complaints about meetings – too many meetings, too many people in meetings, meetings that are too long, meetings that are useless to particular participants, and the list goes on…

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Agile and the Organization

Have you heard about fizzled agile transitions, Scrum-but, Scrummerfall, and other less-than-successful introductions of Agile and lean?  Without considering the larger organization and systemic impacts of the massive change we are introducing, the odds will be heavily stacked against you.  Based on years of experience introducing these types of changes to huge organizations, we put together this introduction to the many things that must be considered for a transformation to have any hope of success.

I spoke about the topic of Agile and the Organization at the PMI’s Orange County chapter.  Attached are the presentation materials.

AgileAndOrg-PMIOC

Agile Hits Ground in the Organization

As the number and size of organizations piloting and adopting Agile projects rapidly increases, most initiatives focus solely on delivery and execution while ignoring the impact that such a radical change may have on an organization – and how that impact may affect the project and product itself.  Most projects view organizational change as a distraction or are likely to simply disregard it.  Furthermore, by definition, it is the responsibility of the project manager or ScrumMaster to shield the team from such distractions rather than leverage them as enablement tools.

In this presentation, we will tell the tale of a failed Agile effort.  We’ll then introduce a number of the common organizational barriers to Agile success – things that you will run into when you introduce Agile – and present the beginnings of an enablement approach that can be used regardless of level of investment.

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Agile Removes Limitations…You Must Now Change The Rules

Scrum-But, Scrummerfall, other fizzled Agile transitions…

Goldratt describes these things (not directly), and similar phenomenon (like failure of companies to get the real benefits from ERP, SAP, 6Sig, Lean, etc.) nicely:

Organizations make rules to deal with/operate in the presence of limitations.  By rules, I mean rules, processes, structures, and other arrangements and things (see the dictionary definition).

Technology (see the dictionary definition) improvements remove limitations.

For a change to truly take hold and succeed, the rules that were made to operate in the presence of the old limitations must be eliminated or changed, and new rules created to deal with new limitations

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Coaches – To Lead or Not To Lead?

I often hear different opinions on what coaches should and shouldn’t do.  One example is whether or not coaches should lead.  One common opinion is that coaches are not leaders.

My opinion may be a bit controversial.

I believe that a coach is whatever she/he needs to be to help their teams get to the next level.  I believe that great coaches are also great leaders, though they are not formally in leadership roles with those they are coaching.

[Read more...]