While agile has zealots, it is not a religion. Agile is a scientific method that converts economic chaos to profit.
Product Owner
Enterprises often have lots of time-sensitive opportunities and insufficient skilled or creative people (called “developers” in this pattern) to do everything.
Problem: Stakeholder competition distracts creative people, interferes with profitable work and creates office politics …
Develop Agile Managers, or Agile Dies
Something is Wrong, It Must Be Agile
To sustain rapid adaptation and innovation, we need good agile managers. But management talent is rare, and agile management talent even rarer.
Danger lurks when executives and managers don’t understand agile. You can tell when managers don’t understand agile: they don’t use it themselves. Agile methods, Scrum particularly, are perfect for managing creative teams, including management teams planning and executing strategy (see Strategy Scrum Teams). [suth2014]
Strategy Scrum Teams
White House Situation Room discussing mission against Osama bin Laden
Management teams can use Strategy Scrum to manage themselves and more effectively finish important work. It creates greater resiliency, a more collaborative culture and deeper agile understanding, which helps their Scrum development teams succeed.
Are We Agile? Answer 6 Questions to Find Out
Iterations of the Light Bulb: Slow Motion Agility?
Are we agile? The strongest, most resilient agile organizations, teams, and individuals follow 6 progressive agile base patterns. To assess your agility, ask how well you follow those patterns. To stay agile, follow the agile base patterns indefinitely. Audit your business agility with this guide. Continue reading
Call to Submit Papers: Agile / Lean at HICSS (January 5-8, 2016)
The Agile/Lean track at HICSS has hosted some of the most interesting papers and influential thinkers on agile, lean and Scrum. We’d like you to hang out with us January 5-8, 2016 in Kauai, Hawaii, USA. You must submit a 10-page IEEE standard format paper by June 15, 2015. Did we mention it’s in Hawaii? Get writing!
Software delivery lead time often follows a Weibull distribution
Top-Down Agile Beats Bottom-Up
Leaders who publicly demonstrate agile methodologies and promote them top-down drive their organizations to sustain agile practices and succeed. But bottom-up agile transformations lack resiliency and generate cultural strife.
Taiichi Ohno, agile coach for Toyota and its executives
Agile methodologies are now widely recommended for managing software development, but most large companies require transformation from entrenched “waterfall development,” an intuitively appealing strategy that has created massive project disasters (see Why Software Fails). Traditionally, most large agile transformations have been pursued bottom-up. One approach starts with a single team, proves agile works, and then expands further and higher in the organization. Hopefully that agile team’s success inspires others to become agile. Another approach religiously converts all engineering teams to adopt a specific agile methodology, but leaves management teams and hierarchies, dependencies, promotion policies, job titles, roles, recruiting and budgeting in their previous form. The developers adopt agile, but the managers don’t. Continue reading
What is an Agile Methodology? How does it beat Waterfall?
Using an agile methodology for project management can help CEOs, organizations, managers, teams and individuals rapidly adapt to change, beat slower competitors and win profitable markets. Agile methodologies were created to prevent the frequent and expensive manufacturing and development failures that arose in “waterfall” or “ad hoc” projects.
Waterfall vs Agile Methodology
Most people tackle large projects using an intuitively obvious approach called “the waterfall method”: plan a sequence of activities upfront (for example: design, prototype, build, test, deploy), then focus on one type of activity after another until they have completed the whole thing. Only in the end do they have something of value. From software development to car manufacturing, the modular sequencing in waterfall has proven extremely risky, resulting in multi-million dollar project cancellations and corporate bankruptcies. The problem arises from the enormous costs that precede real-world testing. There’s a lot of risk riding on the final stage. Continue reading
Agile Leadership Patterns:
The Agile Way of Doing
Agile Leadership Patterns
Dan Greening and Jeff Sutherland will discuss Agile Leadership Patterns: The Agile Way of Doing at the Agile 2015 Conference, August 3–6, 2015. Join us and learn to answer the questions, “Am I agile?”, “Is my organization agile?” and “Are my leaders agile?” You only need to know five patterns.
Call for Papers: Agile / Lean at HICSS (Kauai, January 5-8)
Are you exploring agile/lean management practices? Submit an agile/lean research paper or experience report to the Agile/Lean mini-track at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). The Agile/Lean mini-track at HICSS has been operating continuously since 2007. Influential papers on Scrum patterns, agile metrics, lean forecasting, qualitative grounded inquiry, distributed development and large-company experience reports have appeared in past years.
The HICSS conference, sponsored by IEEE, brings together a broad cross-section of researchers in system sciences—including software development, social media, energy transmission, marketing systems, knowledge management and information systems. Agile and lean management practices apply to all of these fields. HICSS 49 will be held January 5-9, 2016 in Kauai, Hawaii.
If you are researching or innovating in applying agile and lean principles, we welcome your submission. The full call for papers is here: Agile/Lean HICSS-49 Call for Papers.
Help us extend the agile and lean frontier, by presenting your work at HICSS.