May 21, 2013

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Agile Coaching Blog

Rise of the Lean Executive

Posted By on February 20, 2013
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“No institution can possibly survive if it needs geniuses or supermen to manage it.” – Peter Drucker

Drucker has passed on, but fortunately for us his ideas have not.

Corporate executives are turning to books like The Lean Startup for ideas on how to keep their organizations relevant. (I know because I see the growing demand for it in our work)

Lean Executive

They are frustrated and under an enormous amount of pressure. Not only do executives have to worry about other large and mid-sized companies, but now even startups, seemingly come out of nowhere to take away market share.

Executives are discovering it isn’t enough to encourage practices such as building Minimum Viable Products to create meaningful change in their organizations.

Smart executives realize that to win the game, their organizations need to discover, learn, and act quicker than the competition.

I call these executives, Lean Executives. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise Agile, Leadership, Lean Startup, Organizational Agility
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Organizational Agility: Leading Change from the Middle

Posted By on December 3, 2012
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The nature of change is such that if we cannot create a critical mass, enough momentum to create inertia for continuation rather than against continuation, the change will (at best) slowly revert back to its original steady state, regardless of the need driving the change. The same is true with organizational agility and agile transformation efforts. Part of the key to making any change stick is enabling the “right” forces to move the ball off the saddle point in the downhill direction so it generates momentum of its own. Change Management 101.
Organizational agility requires the right forces moving the ball of the saddle point
Here at BigVisible, our typical approach to generating momentum is to introduce enterprise agile adoption at all levels, from delivery teams to executive leadership, and tailor the focus as needed on the ground. We call it the BV Way (you can read more about it here).

Organizational Agility in Action

Recently, I had the pleasure to help Michael Hamman apply this approach with a new client. We started with a pilot team and quickly began scaling the approach to over nine distributed teams in multiple US and India locations. Then, something unexpected (by us) happened. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Enterprise Agile, Organizational Agility
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Agile Coaching Tip: Policies vs. Judgment

Posted By on November 26, 2012
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It started out simple enough, a colleague of mine posted a query to our internal forum about guidelines for sharing certain types of content. At first, I thought nothing of the request, it was just background noise among a group of very busy agile coaches. Then someone shot back that there is no explicit policy for that. Next someone swore there was. One of the more senior coaches said it should be a matter of judgement. Over the next few days this conversation escalated from a simmer to a boil as people debated whether there should be a policy, what it should be, and even why there was so much confusion on this seemingly mundane decision.
Agile Coaching Tip: Too much red tape is crippling, but a little can be helpful
Looking back at this flurry of discussion, I can’t help but appreciate the irony that we are an agile coaching company. We are supposed to be all about empowerment and enablement. Aren’t we the ones who go through large organizations ripping out sclerotic processes and archaic bureaucracy? Yet, here we were, in a heated argument about policies and procedures, and a fairly boring policy at that! Truth be told, I was one of the ones who was actually backing up the idea of having a policy. What gives? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Transformation, Continuous Improvement, Enterprise Agile, Experience from the Field, Organizational Agility
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Lack of Co-location: Problem or Symptom?

Posted By on October 10, 2012
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I was doing some training with middle managers the other week. We were exploring ways that they can help support their teams and organizational change. The topic of agile team co-location came up and we dove right in.

For them, co-location was a hard problem. They had little control over where their team members were located. Members of any given team might be in the same building, even on the same floor, but company policies made any moves difficult. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Enterprise Agile, Organizational Agility
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Agile Myths Busted

Posted By on January 5, 2012
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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
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A Map of Organizational Agility

Posted By on November 27, 2011
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Invariably, when presenting or teaching about applying Agile principles in organizations, someone always asks me, “are there places where you can’t be Agile?” or  ”how do you decide whether or not you want to be Agile?”. These questions trouble me, as it seems like we’re offering a false binary choice. Either you are “Agile” or you aren’t. This perspective fails to communicate the nuance that, when considering an organization, there is a spectrum of Agility and the question really becomes, “how Agile can we make our organization?” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Agile Adoption, Agile Transformation, Enterprise Agile, No Tags
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Pay for (Non)Performance

Posted By on September 28, 2011
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Its been a while since I’ve been a part of a corporate structure with a pay for performance program, but there was always something that never quite sat right with me. I just saw too many people become so consumed with managing what their objectives were, managing how those objectives were measured, basically managing everything except their actual work. [Read more...]

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