The Agile Compass
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Are you sweating over picking the right agile framework?
Whether you use SAFe, LeSS, Scrum, Kanban … is NOT the important success factor for agility. Just as picking the best electric guitar is not gonna make you a rock star. 🎸 Frameworks and models are just 20% of what makes you agile. What really makes or breaks agility?...
Are you afraid of user feedback?
While sprint reviews or system demos are meant to focus on feedback from users, so that you can deliver more value… …some PMs and POs are afraid that user feedback could challenge their plans/backlogs. What I see play out almost every week is the struggle to adopt an...
Have the damn guts to walk out on a meeting!
Take responsibility for your own productive time! Agility is about autonomy. Autonomy means you‘re responsible for your time. Sitting through meetings just because somebody invited you is not a responsible use of your time. 👉 Have the courage to decline meeting...
Transparency is damn misunderstood by many!
🚨 Transparency doesn't mean that management can see everything the team does. Transparency means: 👉 The team can see everything management does. 👉 The team can see everything it does itself (reflection). Transparency is supposed to EMPOWER teams, not to control them!...
A sprint review or system demo without stakeholders is useless.
How many times have you seen sprint reviews without stakeholders? I must admit, I have seen this far too often in my life. And it's a waste of time! Why is it useless? First we have to ask, what the purpose of a review is. I often get answers like: 🤔 to see the...
Leadership is a relationship 🙌
Leadership is not something one person does! It's a relationship between leader and follower. A leader without a follower is not a leader. If you want to be a great leader, ask the people who you want to follow you what they expect from you. Then act accordingly....
Agility is NOT what many companies move towards with their transformation
The meme shows a typical evasive move commonly camouflaged as “Agile Transformation“. Sometimes it‘s a deliberate evasion technique, sometimes it‘s subconscious. What makes you agile is not a set of roles or the implementation of a framework. What makes you agile is a...
The simple 7-step guide for awesome Retrospectives 🙌
Retrospectives often end up as “letting off steam” or “endlessly discussing problems” events. That’s not helpful. Retros should help a team continuously improve! They should feel positive and have impact 🚀 Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough;...
Want faster time-to-market? Increase your decision-making speed!
Want faster time-to-market? Increase your decision-making speed! Many delays in building products come from long decision-making processes. In this time and age, hardly any company can afford to have a slow decision-making process. Some factors slowing down decision...
What makes or breaks an Agile Transformation?
Is it the framework you pick? Is it the tools you use? Is it how many teams dutifully exercise their sprints? I often see significant focus on choosing a scaling framework, teaching people how to do method xyz and picking "agile" tools. 🤔🤨🧐 But that is only...
From Explosions To Success: How Some Leaders’ Approach To Failure Fuels Innovation
I know many leaders who wouldn't have congratulated their people on the explosion of a big project on launch day. The quality of good leadership is to recognize your role and your goals! "Mr. Musk offered congratulations to the SpaceX team on Twitter. “Learned a lot...
Without a goal, Sprint Plannings are wasted time 😳
Sprints need a goal! Just handing out unconnected stories to developers is NOT agile. Product Owners are not only responsible to create and have a product vision, they're also responsible to COMMUNICATE that vision to the developers. 🛑 Stop handing out tasks to...
Almost done – how to ruin your agility with unfinished user stories at the end of a sprint in Scrum!
What to do with an almost finished story at the end of the sprint? Finish it? Carry it over? Put it back? Count 90% of the story points? 100%? 0%? We cannot predict the future. Unexpected things will happen and void our plans – no matter how thorough we plan. That is...
Agile Team Rehearsals: Proven Tactics to Boost Efficiency and Collaboration
"An important success factor for bands are rehearsals and sound checks to deliver a good performance. How do agile project teams "rehearse"?" This was a wonderful question from the audience at my talk "Music & Agility". I want to reply with this article. When...
The Surprising Benefits of Walking Meetings
Who said that meetings have to happen in a room or at a desk? Like with so many things in life we hardly ask about why we do meetings the way we do. And there is a lot to be said about meetings, but I want to focus on one innovative technique today: walking meetings....
Agile Requirements Game (aka Draw the Requirements Game)
Teaching teams the importance of face-to-face communication, feedback loops and a close relation with the client can be hard. Games help to feel and understand why this is so important. This article teaches you a little agile game you can play with your teams and coachees.
Top Reasons Agile Transformations Fail (and How to Avoid Them)
So many companies struggle with their move to agility - why is that? Chances are you know or are part of a company whose agile transformation got stuck half-way and failed to deliver the big promises of agility. At this point you may doubt whether agility really works...
Scrum vs Kanban
Don‘t fret too much over the right agile framework for your company. Focus on an agile culture instead. Establishing an agile culture is the key to success. Without it, none of the frameworks will deliver decisive improvements. Matthias Orgler (Agile Coach)
Is Scrum a too rigid framework?
Countless teams have moaned over Scrum being too rigid and not really suited for their particular domain. As an agile coach responsible for countless agile transitions I strongly disagree. Why do teams claim Scrum would be too rigid? There are several reasons and the...
“We tried Scrum and it didn’t work”
I hear this statement a lot recently. Companies claiming they tried to do Scrum, but even after a year or more it didn't work for them. I disagree – let me tell you why. Scrum is one of several agile frameworks you can use to set your company up for a VUCA world. It...
Understand Sprint Burn-Down Patterns
A Scrum team can learn a lot form sprint burn-down charts. I want to help you recognize typical patterns, understand what causes problems and how to resolve these issues. For continuous improvement in Scrum you need to be able to read the patterns in your burn-down charts.
What is a Sprint Burn-Down Chart?
The burn-down chart is a tool in the agile Scrum framework to unearth inefficiencies in a team and improve towards greater agility. In an agile team or organization you should know about this chart and how to construct it.
Scrum will not make you agile!
Or: Would you trust a Geiger counter to save your life? Disclaimer: I love Scrum — it’s an awesome framework! But too many people believe that Scrum would make their company agile; this is wrong and this is why I wrote this article. Enjoy. When I went to Chernobyl, a...
How to split a user story between two teams?
Do you have user stories that need the expertise of more than one team? How do you organize this? The situation Your specific situation might be slightly different, but here is a common situation I have seen: The company organizes around a few technical platform teams...