Agile Coaching Blog

This agile coaching blog has news & articles from BigVisible coaches and trainers. Find agile topics like Scrum and Kanban. Read about collaboration, communication, & enterprise agile. See hints for better daily meetings, retrospectives, and Scrum reviews. Learn about leading edge tools for lean startup and customer development. Discover information geared toward agile teams as well as leaders & executives.

We hope the information you find here will help your organization become more agile, adaptive, and innovative. Our goal is to help you delight your customers & succeed beautifully.

Agile & Lean Startup: What’s the Most Dangerous Assumption?

Posted By Brian Bozzuto on May 20, 2013
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Last month, I had the privilege to speak at the NY Intrapraneur Meetup group. If you are in the New York City area, and even remotely interested in lean startup and agile, I would strongly recommend you try to attend. While still a small group, everyone is incredibly enthusiastic, thoughtful and has some truly interesting perspectives that made the experience quite educational for me as well.

Lean Startup, Agile, & Dangerous Assumptions

“The Most Dangerous Game” Film, 1932

During the presentation, we were discussing assumptions and tests. At this point someone asked what types of assumptions I thought are the most dangerous. Were they ones that we didn’t realize we were making, the ones we were sure were correct, or what? After a little thought, I came to realize that there is a particularly dangerous assumption many of us don’t think about: that one which was once true, but has since been invalidated.

I particularly love the power of metaphor and have found myself encouraging people to think about project management, software development, and product management to be more like a series of experiments than like building a house, which continues to be the “go to” metaphor within project management, much to my chagrin. However, if we think about it, the comparison to the scientific method also has a fatal limitation. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise Lean Startup, Lean Startup, test
Tagged With: enterprise lean startup, experiments, intrepreneur, Lean Startup, Testing

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Agile Coaching Is (All) About People

Posted By Skip Angel on May 10, 2013
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“You’ve not only made things better, you have truly changed our lives.”

These are the words that every agile coach yearns to hear from the people they work with. While it’s always a goal of mine to change the mindsets of clients, I have had mixed results over my five years as an agile coach. On one six-month engagement with a client I’ll call Prosperity, though, something transformative took place. I’ve spent some time since then thinking about what made those six months so successful and why Prosperity continues to push the envelope of what it is capable of doing as an organization.

Agile Coaching: What Makes It Better With Some Clients?

At first, I thought it was all around the process. Prosperity, like many other clients, started out wanting to “learn agile.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Coaching
Tagged With: Agile Coaching, organizational transformation

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3 Keys for Innovation: Why Lean Startup Isn’t Enough

Posted By David Bland on May 7, 2013
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Innovators have a new dilemma. While it is cheaper than ever to achieve problem/solution fit, the rate of change makes it expensive and difficult to maintain product/market fit.

Companies need to do more than just apply Lean Startup concepts, they need a holistic focus on three key areas:

1. Lean Startup
2. Business Model Innovation
3. Continuous Delivery

lean startup business model innovation continuous delivery

The Dangers of a Myopic Approach

Though leveraging all three at once may seem overwhelming, those who do so can thrive in extreme uncertainty. To see why, let’s start by breaking down the dangers of only focusing on one of these key ingredients. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise Lean Startup, Lean Startup
Tagged With: business model innovation, continuous delivery, enterprise lean startup, Lean Startup

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Continuous Improvement: Feel the Change

Posted By Alan Dayley on May 1, 2013
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Continuous improvement sounds great. Most companies have policies that state continuous improvement is what they seek. If we all actually did it, think how great our companies would be!

The reality is that most people and companies do not continuously improve. I certainly don’t! There are many reasons that continuous improvement is so hard. One of them is that change is uncomfortable.

Feel the Change

If we are going to continuously improve, we need to become comfortable with change. Big changes are certainly hard but can we use many small changes to get used to how change feels? Yes, we can. Here is a small experiment to prove it! Most people, without even thinking about it, have patterns and habits that we follow. This is good, because remaking all the same little choices every single day would be untenable to our sanity. We can also use these habits to practice feeling change.

As an example I will tell you about how I put my shoes on in the morning. (Maybe this is starting to sound silly but, stay with me here.)

Continuous Improvement Means Many Small Changes

Tie differently (Image (CC) by Maya83 on Flickr)

If I don’t think about the process, this is what I do every time I put on my shoes: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Transformation, Continuous Improvement
Tagged With: Agile Transformation, continuous improvement, Organizational Change, Process Improvement

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An Experiment in Learning, Agile & Lean Startup Style

Posted By Jim Elvidge on April 18, 2013
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I always have a backlog of non-fiction books to read. Given the amount of free time that I have every day, I am guessing that it may be years before I get through them. In fact, the rate at which books get added to my backlog probably exceeds my learning velocity, creating an ever-increasing gap. It feels like a microcosm of Eddie Obeng’s “world after midnight.”

So what to do?

learning agility

I am trying to increase my velocity by applying speed reading techniques. But so far, that is probably only closing a small percentage of the gap.

Iterative Learning

Then, upon a bit of soul searching, I had an epiphany. Why do I feel the need to read and understand every single word on every single page? This runs counter to what we coach our teams to do—eliminate waste, only document what makes sense, just-in-time practices, and applying iterative thinking instead of only incremental. The answer seemed to be that I don’t feel that I have really read the book if I haven’t read every word. So what? Am I trying to conquer the thing? It seems like a very egocentric point of view.

What if I was able to let go of the ego, and try to read a book iteratively instead of incrementally? Is it even possible? Would it be effective? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Continuous Improvement, Lean Startup
Tagged With: agile, agile learning, enterprise lean startup, Lean Startup

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Agile Delivery: From ScrumMaster to Team Coach

Posted By Skip Angel on April 17, 2013
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Several weeks ago, one of my colleagues at BigVisible brought up an interesting concern around agile delivery and the ScrumMaster. How is, he asked, that there are so many ScrumMasters out there who are unprepared for their role on a team?

Agile Delivery Team Coach ScrumMaster

As I thought about it, I realized that the two-day CSM course basically introduces new ScrumMasters, team members, and other interested parties to how Scrum works and how to move teams through the ceremonies and artifacts associated with Scrum. What it doesn’t do—and likely cannot do in just two days—is also focus on all of the things ScrumMasters have to do to foster truly high-performing teams. The ScrumMaster role, done right, is much more than just scheduling meetings and updating a burndown chart. That leads me to conclude that the name ScrumMaster should (or will) die and be replaced with one that reflects the truly comprehensive nature of the role: team coach. Here’s why: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Coaching, Agile Delivery, Agile Teams, Scrum Roles
Tagged With: Advanced ScrumMaster, Agile Coach, agile delivery coach, scrummaster, team coach

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Continuous Improvement: How Does Authority Affect You?

Posted By Alan Dayley on April 16, 2013
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During last week’s BigVisible Office Day, I led a discussion about authority. This is one of those key concepts that we all think we understand. The reality is that each of us has deeply ingrained views, experiences and emotions about authority. These deep-seated mental models affect how we react to each other in certain situations. On top of all that, authority is a primary component of both the work we do and the culture of the organizations in which we work.

Words About Authority in Continuous Improvement Context

Authority Words

In this photo are some other words and thoughts we associated with authority. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Collaboration, Continuous Improvement, Organizational Agility
Tagged With: Agile Coaching, Agile teams, Agile Transformation, continuous improvement, enablement, organizational agility, Team Building

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Agile Transformation: Some of What This Agile Coach Has Learned

Posted By Alan Dayley on April 10, 2013
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I had the pleasure of “meeting” my online friend Daniel Markham this week. We had an interesting talk about agile transformation and agile coaching. We still need to shake hands someday but recording a conversation is still pretty great!

Agile Transformation, Agile Coaching, and Everything

In an unscripted interview, Daniel hit me with some difficult questions about life as an agile coach. We spent a good bit of time talking about the challenges of an agile transformation.

Agile Transformation & Agile Coach

We discussed some of the reasons agile is not just about teams and delivery. And we spent some time on how transforming a company means transforming everyone, not just the technology people.

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Tribal Leadership: Why Enterprise Lean Startup Is So Difficult

Posted By Tom Looy on April 9, 2013
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Enterprise lean startup (applying Lean Startup concepts inside an existing enterprise) is difficult. A group at my current client had a discussion recently that taught me a great deal about why that is. This group has self-organized into a book club. First they read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, then Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh of Zappos. And now they are reading Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan.

Enterprise Lean Startup, Tribal Leadership, Delivering Happiness

Tribal Leadership & Enterprise Lean Startup

The basics of tribal leadership are pretty simple. The book describes five stages of tribes:

Stage 1: Life sucks. People at Stage 1 are characterized by despair and hostility. They often join tribes that are gangs.

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Hours-Remaining Burndown Charts: An Agile Anti-Pattern?

Posted By Mike Dwyer on April 4, 2013
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The hours-remaining burndown chart is a planning tool that allows the Scrum team to know how well they are using their time in delivering the working software. Hours-remaining burndown charts track the time remaining on each task, and show at-a-glance whether the team’s sprint plan is on track to finish all of their stories by the end of the sprint.

Yet, all too often, I hear of teams whose hours-remaining burndown charts seem to lie to them. The team appears to be on target for the sprint, their estimates seem to be spot on, yet they still have stories left dangling at the end of the sprint. Worse, many times these are the most critical stories! Why? [Read more...]