Alright, do you measure the effectiveness of product owners by how much time they devote to writing great user stories? Many do – more or less explicitly. But there is a hard truth: The better the Product Owner, the less time they spend writing user stories ?!
What is better: An iterative approach with rapid experiments and lots of failures, or a cautious big upfront planning trying to sketch a perfect solution while avoiding risks? While we Agile Coaches talk a lot about this topic, it helps to look at real world cases of...
If you can change direction every 2 weeks ?, but you only decide to change direction once a year ?, you‘re not agile. Agility is far too often confined to the delivery organization. But without agility on the portfolio level, you‘re not actually using that delivery...
Agility is much more than teaching teams to deliver in sprints. If your goal is to tackle the challenges of today, you'd better become agile on all levels. Traditional budgeting often works somewhat like this: ? Management decides to pursue a business opportunity?...
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?...
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...
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 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....
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...
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...