Author: Dan Greening

  • Business Agility: Why & How

    Business Agility: Why & How

    Business agility helps organizations adapt rapidly to unexpected changes. Agile businesses have survived market, supply chain, and regulatory changes, while rigid businesses have gone bankrupt. If you want to know why your business should be agile, and how to get there, you’ve come to the right place.

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  • Align to a Driving Purpose

    Align to a Driving Purpose

    People are working. Their efforts should produce something important. But… Unfocused activities produce poor results

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  • Scrum

    Scrum

    Context: Creative people—such as engineers, designers, managers, researchers, lawyers, architects and investors—increasingly work on critical projects in teams. But… Sustained creative progress isn’t predictable

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  • Agility
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    Agility

    Context: We have a goal requiring creative effort. We want to succeed. Overplanning increases risk … When embarking on a creative project, success seems certain. We plan optimistically, and then almost immediately after we start, delays and challenges emerge. The plan and likely outcome keep diverging. We become more realistic. We double down on effort.…

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  • Leading Indicators to Assess Agile Portfolio Health

    Leading Indicators to Assess Agile Portfolio Health

    In this podcast, Dr. Dan Greening is back to follow up in the earlier podcast interview about Agile Base Patterns. This time, Dan and Dave Prior discuss leading indicators you can study to assess Agile Portfolio Health. During the podcast, they dig in to metrics that can be used to assess Lead Time, Abandoned Work and Fitness Functions. Podcast…

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  • Agile Living

    Agile Living

    What I’m looking for in the dharma is not just a set of effective self-help techniques, stripped of philosophical and ethical context. I’m seeking to find a way of life.  —Stephen Batchelor Two years ago, I paused writing about agile practices. Many factors contributed: I was considering a move to Asia, I was separating from my spouse of 28…

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  • Is Agile a Subset of Lean Manufacturing?
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    Is Agile a Subset of Lean Manufacturing?

    If you hang around agilists long enough, someone will mention lean manufacturing, Toyota Production System or Kanban. Since these concepts predate Agile, you might wonder how they relate, and perhaps why lean manufacturing wasn’t directly applied to software (until perhaps recently with Lean/Kanban). You might wonder whether Agile is just a subset of Lean Manufacturing.

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  • Fix Systemic Problems

    Fix Systemic Problems

    Context: When unimpeded by outside forces, we rapidly adapt to circumstances and succeed, but this perfect independence rarely exists. Problem: External factors limit our flow … We don’t have the knowledge, specialty resources, elasticity or authorization to do everything ourselves, but relying on others puts us at risk.

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  • Agile Leadership Patterns: 15 Minute Video

    Agile Leadership Patterns: 15 Minute Video

    Want to understand agile and its challenges fast? Check out this comprehensive 15 minute video. Dan Greening (Senex Rex) and Brent Barton (SolutionsIQ) explore the fundamental patterns of agility; how leadership inhibits and nurtures agility; why agile is hard to maintain; how to tell rapidly if a person, team or organization is agile; how to build agile…

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  • Limit Work in Progress

    Limit Work in Progress

    Context: We measure progress and experiment with processes and products. However, experiments can take a long time, and failures can have huge costs. We have a lot of balls in the air, a lot of inventory to sell, and a lot of great stuff that isn’t quite done yet. We have a problem … We adapt…

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