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Create and sustain business agility with Senex Rex

Scrum at Scale Enterprise Coaching Agile Finance
Scrum@Scale Practitioner Training

Business Agility Research

 Certified Enterprise Coach

Agile Assessment

Agile Patterns Research

 Agile Capitalization Workshop

Agile Budgeting Workshop

Agile Finance and Contracting Research

Your investment in agile management—for software, hardware, data science, marketing, user experience, or for your whole enterprise—can deliver dramatic improvements in revenue and cost. But not all agile transformations succeed and sustain, and only a few gain the promised hyper-productivity of Scrum. Who can provide the best training, coaching and advice on your challenging road ahead?

Dan Greening is an excellent thought leader in the agile world. He has demonstrated that he’s one step ahead of the industry and is willing to tackle the tough challenges. —Chris Sheridan, American Express, Director of Enterprise Agile Development, DevOps

Senex Rex offers consulting, coaching, and training to improve corporate agility. We have pioneered and published case studies on agile capitalization and budgeting, on Scrum at scale in software, marketing, and data science departments, and on business agility metrics. We focus on only a few clients—we operate with agility ourselves—so catch us if you can. We have led large organizations, departments, and startups, and we have delivered company-wide agile transformations. Agile organizations contribute to healthier societies, so our mission, not just our job, is to help you succeed with agile for years to come.

What we will do

We first assess your existing organization with you, your teams, and your executives. Then we develop a plan to develop business agility, with focused training, coaching, and advice, from the best people we know. Likely some of those are internal to Senex Rex, but we have plenty of collaborators. We have pioneered enterprise scaling, agile capitalization, agile enterprise metrics, and agile recruiting. We have the peer-reviewed publications and client references to prove it. Partnering with Senex Rex helps you develop the rocket-science to succeed.

Our work is “done done” (as agilists say) when you have achieved and can sustain stand-alone agile discipline. We supply agile training materials, agile coaching guides, recruiting content, career paths, performance evaluation guides, capitalization policies and other assets for your company’s future use.

Clients

We have helped Skype, Microsoft, Citrix, Glassdoor and others organize departments, develop software and deliver customer-loved products and services, more rapidly and efficiently. We can likely help you, too.

Courses

Senex Rex offers packaged training programs and coaching.

Certified Scrum@Scale Practitioner

Rapidly assess your organization and identify constraints that slow you down. Responsibly hire and promote candidates with the agile characteristics you need. Safely experiment with markets and production to find and exploit opportunities others have missed. Create a continuous improvement culture that involves everyone and solves long-standing problems. Build management teams that focus on strategic transformations you need to succeed.

Agile Capitalization Workshop

Follow GAAP principles to defensibly classify internal software and product development work. Capitalize long-term value creation. Use story points as a more reliable source for work tracking than time sheets. Collaborate with finance, engineering and auditing groups to gain mutual agreement and rock-solid traceability.

Certified Scrum Product Owner

Identify market opportunities and develop customers rapidly using customer development and lean startup strategies. Use agile metrics to forecast and meet delivery dates. Produce incremental releases that test market assumptions and rapidly adapt to discoveries. Support agile development teams to solve customer and user problems fast.

Certified Scrum Master

Organize highly effective teams of creative people who produce high quality results in short increments, using Scrum, Kanban, XP and/or DevOps. Gather reliable statistics to help your organization forecast accurately. Identify and mitigate dangerous production and architectural risks. Rapidly adapt to new discoveries in the market or in production work. Automate expensive manual work, such as manual testing or deployment, to create a more rewarding and creative work place.

Short Course: Agile Manager

Identify high-talent, teachable and low-talent managers, and understand how to develop and achieve success for them and the organization. Assess the agility of individuals, teams, managers and organizations, using Agile Base Patterns. Assess your own agility and construct a game-plan to improve ourselves. Introduce Strategy Scrum into management projects, to improve success and sustainability. Change organizations using the Kotter Organizational Change model, specifically in this area of agile manager development.

Coaching

Improve agile performance and sustainability with executive, manager and team coaching. Learn more about Senex Rex Coaching.

What Are Agile Methodologies?

Most people and companies tackle large projects using waterfall development methodologies: they segregate activities upfront (design, prototype, build, test, deploy), then focus on each activity in sequence until they have completed the whole project. Only in the end do we have something of value. It could work if early assumptions are right, but for innovative work, waterfall methodologies usually produce inferior economic results compared to agile alternatives. In software development, car manufacturing and military campaigns, the waterfall approach has proven extremely risky, resulting in multi-million dollar walk-aways and corporate bankruptcies.

Recently, successful people and companies have adopted agile development methodologies—including Scrum, Lean Startup, Toyota Production System, Extreme Programming (XP), Lean Manufacturing, Kanban and others. They embrace five agile base patterns in what we call the Agile Canon. Agile methodologies

Organizations that adopt the Agile Canon base patterns focus on success, learn rapidly about market and production realities, adapt faster, collaborate better and sustainably improve.

Agile methodologies require significant discipline to maintain. Many corporate transformations to agile methodologies have failed, with employees saying that they’re “agile, I guess” while failing to sustain anypillars in the Agile Canon. Most agile transformations focus on team-level coaching as the highest priority, but we have discovered that organizations can more cost-effectively maintain and improve agility by emphasizing executive and manager training, coaching and on-boarding.

If your executives and managers understand and embrace the Agile Canon base patterns, they will drive your company to be agile. Despite many documents highlighting the benefits of agile methodologies to software development, the Agile Canon applies to most of your company: management teams planning and executing on long-term strategy, HR teams orchestrating a big recruiting effort, marketing teams producing content for a series of campaigns, etc.

When the whole company can rapidly adapt to changing conditions, you win. Is this corporate agility beneficial to software developers? If you want the company to support your agile efforts, it is essential.