February 4, 2012

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BigVisible Blog

Organizational Agility: Beyond Agile Teams

February 1, 2012 By Giora Morein 2 Comments

For years, companies and teams have focused on adopting agile at the team level. Team members and ScrumMasters work to improve their sprint planning and collaboration techniques—the things they do on a day-to-day basis to execute work. Product owners, ScrumMasters, and team members also focus heavily on delivering projects—learning how to use a product backlog, do release planning, and deliver more, faster. The problem is, being good at executing Scrum or Kanban is not the goal. Organizational agility is the goal.

Suppose, for example, you reach a point in your agile implementation where teams are delivering and executing in a much more productive and efficient way. That begs the question, are they delivering the right things? Now that teams can deliver faster with better quality, how does an organization leverage these newly acquired super-skills?  [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Transformation, Enterprise Agile, Organizational Agility Tagged With: , ,

To Unit Test or not to Unit Test? That is the question. Really!?!?

January 14, 2012 By Tom Looy Leave a Comment

Is considering having a development team do Unit Testing something an Agile Coach should ask regarding their client?  Shouldn’t it be obvious?  Let’s see…

Introduction

My current assignment has me coaching a software development group that is responsible for adding features to a legacy product that is on a yearly ‘shrink wrap’ release cycle.  The product is over 25 years old and is approximately 18M lines of code and has millions of users.  There are not many software products out there that are this old and this big and are being developed by a team that wants to embrace Agile.  We are like pioneers in a new territory.

The product development group (approximately 20 teams) started their Agile adoption process approximately 18 months ago on their own.  After a year of adopting Scrum they decided to get an outside perspective on their progress so they contacted BigVisible to help them assess where they were and help plan next steps for Phase 2 of their Agile adoption.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Coaching, Experience from the Field

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

January 12, 2012 By George Schlitz Leave a Comment

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.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Transformation, CrAgile, Enterprise Agile Tagged With:

Beyond Functional Silos with Communities of Practice

January 12, 2012 By Brian Bozzuto Leave a Comment

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… An organization decides to align its operation around business products. It organizes all of its product development into cross-functional teams with each team focused exclusively on one product. The business likes the focus, but soon people start to complain. Functional experts feel isolated and aren’t able to tap into their technical peers who are now isolated in other teams. Common practices and standards become difficult. Functional managers feel left out, as they don’t have much of a role now that their people are permanently assigned to specific business units and are dedicated members of a cross-functional team. Overall, the organization certainly sees advantages to the re-alignment, but they can’t help but feel they are neglecting their institutional knowledge and have reduced some of their technical capacity to solve problems. You might think I’m talking about an Agile development team, but actually I’m talking about Chrysler in the 1990′s when they re-organized their engineering around auto lines. (Wenger et al, Cultivating Communities of Practice 1)

Indeed, the challenges that agile organizations have been facing as they embrace team centric work have actually been confronted by numerous organizations prior to Agile. Automobile companies, professional consultancies, oil companies, and even the world bank have encountered this challenge where their technical experts have become ensconced in cross-functional project silos. Looking at how these organizations have addressed this challenge offers us some interesting insights. The successful organizations didn’t try to bolster their functional silos or build standards groups, but rather they embraced a more informal and organic model for sharing knowledge, solving problems and even making strategic investments: communities of practice.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Transformation, Enterprise Agile Tagged With: , , , , ,

Faces of Power in the Organization

January 11, 2012 By David Bland 1 Comment

Faces of PowerThe lines between political science and organizational culture continue to blur. Those who venture into organizations need to become well versed in the dynamics of power. One such explanation of these dynamics is Steven Lukes’ the “Three Faces of Power”.

Three Faces of Power

1. Decision Making – The power to make and implement decisions

2. Non-Decision Making – The power to set agendas and therefore limit what is even being discussed

3. Shaping Desires – The power to manipulate what people think they want

Lukes’ work is an extension of Max Weber’s Three Types of Authority, in which Lukes argues that Weber only focused on the first face of power, Decision Making.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Coaching, Agile Transformation, Enterprise Agile, Leadership

A coach’s moral dilemma

January 11, 2012 By Alex Singh 10 Comments

A fellow coach recently asked me for my opinion on an ethical dilemma — was it morally right for us to show people a new way of doing things knowing fully well that we were setting the group for eventual disappointment. Disappointment in his case is inevitable and will start setting in as soon as the parent company begins assimilating the subdivision and mandating that the latter operate under the parent organization’s restrictive rules and policies. My simple and somewhat glib answer was that we were doing the right thing by helping people get better and were providing them the wherewithal to make informed decisions about their future career. And, if in the end, the employees were unhappy they could take their knowledge elsewhere to an employer who would value their expertise. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Coaching, Agile Transformation, Enterprise Agile, Leadership Tagged With: , ,

Top 7 reasons for lack of creativity in an organization

January 9, 2012 By Alex Singh 1 Comment

Summary:

  • Leadership is crucial for defining a shared vision and generating buy-in from employees.
  • C-level managers are responsible for creating a learning organization that values systems thinking, craftsmanship, and team learning.
  • C-level managers must design an organization whose structure, processes, metrics, rewards, and talent align with the organization’s mission.
  • Managers are responsible for creating a well-trained, well-organized, well-managed company. If people require constant supervision then management has failed to do its job.

Last year, the new CEO at a client decided to leapfrog existing competitors by creating an innovative product; a product that would attract customers and cause competitors to play catch-up. A team that included the best developers, in the company, was hand-picked; the business was told that cost was not a concern; and the group was secluded from the day-to-day madness and allowed to focus on getting the job done. Despite this the program was a failure and ultimately the task of innovation was “outsourced.” What happened?

A number of major shortcomings inherent in the existing culture doomed the endeavor from the start; these shortcomings were very visible to outsiders but not to long-term employees. Not all organizations face all of these shortcomings — based on my experience, these are more prevalent in larger organizations.

  • C-level managers not creating a learning organization
  • Lack of a compelling vision
  • Lack of prioritization and understanding of what is truly valuable
  • Org structures and policies that stifle collaboration and communication of ideas, information, and feelings
  • Reward/merit system that punishes innovation and risk taking
  • Overly focusing on utilization
  • Perception that senior management does not walk their talk

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise Agile, Experience from the Field, Leadership Tagged With: , , , , ,

Top 11 Books, Videos and Conference for 2011

January 6, 2012 By Scott Dunn, CST, PMP Leave a Comment

I had one of those great, intellectually charged conversations the other day with a colleague and friend, one of those discussions that leaves your mind abuzz. One nugget that came out of it was what books I had read this last year that have had the biggest impact on me as an agile coach and trainer. Here’s the list I shared with him, along with some other tops for 2011:

Must Read
Switch – How to Change When Change is Hard – A great read with lots of science and stories behind how and why people and groups change. Provides a structure to follow in leading change. A must-read for coaches and those leading change efforts.
The Lean Start-up – Eric’s book provides the framework, reasoning and experience on how to swiftly determine the product to build. More than that, Eric provides pragmatic understanding of why traditional businesses and management behave the way they do, and how to deliver measurable, actionable way to change that. A must-read for anyone in IT, product development, management or executive leadership (so, everyone).
Getting Naked – Shedding the Three Fears that Sabotage Client Loyalty – Patrick Lencioni shares what makes real consultants (and consulting) awesome, versus those traditional consulting companies that we all love to hate. A must-read for anyone in consulting or in other ways provides professional services.
I would add The Goal by Goldratt because I loved the use of a fictional story to learn about lean and the theory of constraints, but it hasn’t had the practical impact that the other books above did. Also, I found Mindset – The New Psychology of Success insightful (for clients, myself and even my kids). This book was the core material behind one of the most inspirational talks (a keynote y Linda Rising) at Agile 2011.

Filed Under: Leadership Tagged With: , ,

Agile Doesn’t Work For…

January 5, 2012 By Jim Elvidge 8 Comments

Ever run across these guys?  People whose lack of experience or fear of change cause them conjure up all kinds of reasons why agile won’t work for their project?

Let’s bust those myths!

 

Myth: Agile Doesn’t Work for Projects in the Highly Regulated Medical Environment.  (The reason usually given is that FDA regulations require detailed requirements prior to project approval; hence, waterfall.  However, in reality, you can develop in phases, with small incremental sets of requirements and the FDA requires only enough documentation to demonstrate your process.)

Truth: Abbott Labs overcame medical device regulation and stringent Class 3 certification and developed the m2000 Real-time PCR Diagnostics System, a human blood analysis tool, with four agile teams.  Compared to the prior methodology in use, this project resulted in a less cumbersome process, fewer defects, a reduction in costs of 43%, and a reduction in cycle time of 25%.

(Rasmussen, R., Hughes, T., Jenks, J. R., & Skach, J. (2009). Adopting agile in an FDA regulated environment. Proceedings of the Agile 2009 Conference (Agile 2009), Chicago, Illinois, USA, 151-155)

 

Myth: Agile Doesn’t Work in Government

Truth: The FBI overcame a CMMI level 3, ISO 9001, government-mandated document-driven waterfall life cycle and developed the Domestic Terrorist Database & Data Warehouse with three agile teams.  Compared to the prior methodology in use, this project resulted in significant improvements in release planning, developer satisfaction, and a focus on the true goal: “to catch bad guys.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Transformation, Contracts, Enterprise Agile, Experience from the Field Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Don’t Take Stickies on Vacation

January 4, 2012 By Jim Elvidge Leave a Comment

Some of the people on my teams like to play a game called “Tease the Agile Coach by Pretending Everything He Does is Agile.”

Last fall I went on a 2-week vacation with my wife in France.  When I returned, of course, the gag was “Did you run your vacation agile style?”  ”Did you start every morning with a scrum?”   I love playing along, but as I thought about it, to my horror, there was a lot of “agility” to my vacation, and maybe their teasing wasn’t so far from the truth. [Read more...]

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