When agile coaches have no access or influence with high-level managers, agile transformations won’t work; Zach Bonaker walks away from those agile coaching opportunities. Ryan Ripley observes that when low-level agile coaches teach engineers there’s a better way, and management won’t become agile themselves, many smart developers will leave the dysfunctional company and join a company with agile managers. We need new ways of communicating with executives, to help their companies become more agile and keep their best talent. Continue reading
Monthly Archives: June 2015
Agile Open Southern California 2015
This is Heidi Helfand, Director of Agile Coaching at AppFolio. Senex Rex offered its blog to let folks know about a conference called Agile Open Southern California, on September 10 and 11, 2015 at UC Irvine, and I’m grabbing it!
Chunk Before Choosing
Creative people with limited resources, such as product managers, developers, CEOs, investors and artists, must choose which items to assess, staff or fund. They compare value, cost, flexibility and risk to make a decision.
Faced with too many options, we choose badly …
How to Read and Write Pattern Languages
Pattern languages can help us understand complex systems. Read how pattern languages work, and how you can write your own. We are defining agility and its practices using a pattern language called the Agile Canon. Using the first five patterns in the Agile Canon, you can diagnose whether your team is agile, whether it can keep its agility, and whether it expands agility beyond the team’s boundaries.
Experiment to improve
Context: Plenty of data informs us. We can forecast when things will happen. Our progress metrics are aligned with long term goals. But externalities impede our progress: competitors emerge, delays harm us. We are passive victims of outside circumstance.
Passivity until risks are revealed can be too late …
We suspect unknown dangers, economic loss, and growing ineffectiveness. Our friends reassure us, choosing their words carefully. Existing data is eerily stable. We aren’t learning anything new.
Continue reading
Agile Supply Chains Take the Lead
Dustin Mattison interviewed me on how one could apply agile principles to supply chain management. The interview shows how to map Agile Base Patterns to a non-software field.
You can listen to the podcast here: The Five Characteristics of Sustainable Agile Methods, from the Future of Supply Chains blog.
Agile Cancer: Stop Whining and Cure It
As we speak, agile leaders are killing their children. Dave Thomas proclaims that Agile is now for “people who don’t do things”. Giles Bowkett argues that “Scrum should basically just die in a fire.” Alistair Cockburn stood in front of Agile 2009 to proclaim “I come to bury Agile, not to praise it.” Like spoiled children whose oversights were exposed, the shock jocks among us are happy to pound their chests in defiance, yet simultaneously cry over their own spilled milk. Continue reading