Scrum implementations have the characteristics of an iceberg. The tip of the iceberg is what is explicit in the Scrum Guide whilst the much larger mass under the waterline is deep adoption of the implications of Scrum and Lean. This is where far greater payoffs from Agile adoption are to be found. Unfortunately, few people are aware of many of the deep implications and far fewer have experienced a Scrum adoption that goes beyond the tip of the iceberg.
The recent articulation of LeSS and it’s contrast with SAFe is drawing attention to the difference between shallow and deep Scrum. This session will take you in a submersible below the waterline and use a spotlight to illuminate the vast potential to improve your organisation through deep Scrum.
In comparing LeSS with SAFe, we illuminate ways to…
1. Scale vertically, not just horizontally to help thousands pull together as one.
2. Reduce bureaucratic control and increase business-development collaboration.
3. Transform the win-lose contract game between business and IT into a win-win co-operative game.
4. Focus everyone on the end-customer and re-structure around this.
5. Produce a potentially shippable product increment every fortnight.
6. Enable the organisation to "turn on a dime, for a dime".
7. Enable anti-fragile self-optimising of both What customer value is created and How it is created.
8. Radically simplify organisational structure without the overheads of unnecessary specification, co-ordination and reporting roles.
9. Unleash the potential of real self-managing teams without this being unwittingly constrained.
10. Allow managers to shift from managing the what, the how and tracking to the much more impactful work of capability building.
Many organisations that we encounter in New Zealand are keen on what Agile promises. Why then are they not realising the promises sought at the scale necessary to make a substantial difference for an overall customer offering or line of business? Why are many organisations on their 2nd, 3rd or 4th attempt at “Agile Transformation”? Why are so many Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches still frustrated by many of the same ongoing frictions experienced before the pandemic with even less ability to address them?
Many years of experiences across the Tasman and consultation with change agents around the world reveal clear answers. There is a set of relatively straightforward choices that make the difference between whether an organisation struggles for years with the problems above or finds the path of sustainable, world class agility at scale. For a commercial organisation, this means competitive advantage. For a public sector organisation, this means stakeholder trust and delightful experiences. For employees it means less friction and more engagement.
During this session we will share insights around the following questions with reference to experience reports.
Why do many scaled Agile adoptions stall out after the first 1-2 years rather than improve continuously?
Why does the most popular way to scale incur high coordination overheads and fall short of high agility?
Is there a way to eliminate dependencies and have knowledge and skills be the constraint on agility, rather than structure and process?
Why does setting up Scrum Teams for each component of a product make it unlikely that everyone is working on the right things?
Why does delegating responsibility for Agile transformation outcomes to internal Agile Coaches or external management consultants result in “change theatre”?
What are the key leadership questions that can unlock up to 95% of your organisation’s performance?
What changes are necessary for your scaled Agile adoption to be sustained beyond the tenure of the leader who introduced it?
What is an alternative scaling model and adoption approach addressing all of the above issues that New Zealand is yet to benefit from?
See more clearly what’s limiting the effectiveness and longevity of your scaled Agile adoption. Discover options never experienced before in New Zealand.
10 steps to a successsful enterprise agile transformation global scrum 2018Agile Velocity
Presented at Scrum Gathering Minneapolis, Senior Agile Coach and Trainer Mike Hall provides leaders and managers 10 steps to a successful enterprise Agile transformation.
The Product Backlog drives the work of Scrum teams, but keeping the backlog fresh and useful is often a continuing challenge. Is your product backlog healthy, and what are some ways to keep it that way that you can use right away?
Introduction to Scrum presentation which outlines common issues in software development, what is Scrum, and an introduction to the Scrum framework. This presentation has been used for training and presentations to both technology and business audiences.
Many organisations that we encounter in New Zealand are keen on what Agile promises. Why then are they not realising the promises sought at the scale necessary to make a substantial difference for an overall customer offering or line of business? Why are many organisations on their 2nd, 3rd or 4th attempt at “Agile Transformation”? Why are so many Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches still frustrated by many of the same ongoing frictions experienced before the pandemic with even less ability to address them?
Many years of experiences across the Tasman and consultation with change agents around the world reveal clear answers. There is a set of relatively straightforward choices that make the difference between whether an organisation struggles for years with the problems above or finds the path of sustainable, world class agility at scale. For a commercial organisation, this means competitive advantage. For a public sector organisation, this means stakeholder trust and delightful experiences. For employees it means less friction and more engagement.
During this session we will share insights around the following questions with reference to experience reports.
Why do many scaled Agile adoptions stall out after the first 1-2 years rather than improve continuously?
Why does the most popular way to scale incur high coordination overheads and fall short of high agility?
Is there a way to eliminate dependencies and have knowledge and skills be the constraint on agility, rather than structure and process?
Why does setting up Scrum Teams for each component of a product make it unlikely that everyone is working on the right things?
Why does delegating responsibility for Agile transformation outcomes to internal Agile Coaches or external management consultants result in “change theatre”?
What are the key leadership questions that can unlock up to 95% of your organisation’s performance?
What changes are necessary for your scaled Agile adoption to be sustained beyond the tenure of the leader who introduced it?
What is an alternative scaling model and adoption approach addressing all of the above issues that New Zealand is yet to benefit from?
See more clearly what’s limiting the effectiveness and longevity of your scaled Agile adoption. Discover options never experienced before in New Zealand.
10 steps to a successsful enterprise agile transformation global scrum 2018Agile Velocity
Presented at Scrum Gathering Minneapolis, Senior Agile Coach and Trainer Mike Hall provides leaders and managers 10 steps to a successful enterprise Agile transformation.
The Product Backlog drives the work of Scrum teams, but keeping the backlog fresh and useful is often a continuing challenge. Is your product backlog healthy, and what are some ways to keep it that way that you can use right away?
Introduction to Scrum presentation which outlines common issues in software development, what is Scrum, and an introduction to the Scrum framework. This presentation has been used for training and presentations to both technology and business audiences.
Session Abstract:
Agile framework is based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. It’s a set of values and principles that help teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences and continuous feedback.
Scrum is the most popular methodology under the Agile umbrella. Scrum emphasizes empirical feedback, team self-management, and striving to build shippable product increments within short iterations.
Kanban is another popular flavor of Agile that focuses on visualizing and managing the flow of work, in order to balance demand with available capacity and remove bottlenecks.
Learning Objectives:
> Gain a broad understanding of the Agile framework
> Discover Scrum and Kanban, the two most widely used Agile methodologies, and see how they can be used in construction industry
> Find out how Scrum and Kanban can be combined to have the best of both worlds (Scrumban)
The Scrum Master and the Product Owner are critical to success of agile development teams using Scrum with the authority to make changes to the process, suggest team members take action, and empower members to do tasks correctly, in support of increasing the probability of project success.
Ever wondered how Agile can be implemented in larger organisation/project. SAFe is the answer. In this session we will understand the core principles and values that is require to implement SAFe in larger organisation.
Product Backlog - Refinement and Prioritization TechniquesVikash Karuna
This presentation describes the important techniques used in Product Backlog refinement and prioritization in Agile development. The various techniques described here are very useful for product managers, product owners, scrum masters, and agile teams.
Updated with latest version as presented at the Canberra Agile & Scrum meetup on July 20, 2017. Previously titled "Using Agile techniques to manage risk more effectively".
Given that the "Waterfall" process model has been dominant in the IT industry for many decades, how many IT and project management professionals are aware that it's inventor warned the world in 1970 that Waterfall is "risky and invites failure"?
From a risk management perspective, is waterfall ever an appropriate choice for complex IT initiatives given what we know now?
In this session we will outline how, as a risk management strategy, using the waterfall model for non-trivial systems development initiatives is systemically high risk as compared with the Iterative Incremental Development (IID) model that has been used in pockets of the IT industry since the late 1950's. Today, many organisations use the IID strategy under the umbrella term of 'Agile'. The majority of these employ Lean Product Development patterns that were first described in the Harvard Business Review in 1986 using a metaphor borrowed from the game of rugby i.e. 'Scrum'.
If you are not using a disciplined agile approach, are you facing more risk as you approach a high-stakes deadline than you need to?
The varied contexts that we work in come with varied types of risk. For a green fields date-driven release, the primary risk may be cost and schedule related. For teams designing a new product for an emerging market, the primary risks may be business risk. For teams doing innovative R&D, the primary risk may technical risk. For a young team in a new technical or business domain, the primary risk may be social risk. In this session, we will use real world examples of such varied challenges to illustrate how risk-tuned Agile helped us to manage risk effectively.
Whilst we will always have to deal with risk to create value, the good news is that there are now many powerful risk management techniques that can be overlaid on top of IID to tune your development process to the type of risk you face. The question is: which ones are most appropriate for the type of risk you are facing? In this workshop we outline a series of powerful risk management tools that tune an agile development process to effectively manage the type of risk that you face.
Ever wonder why Agile teams swear by relative estimation? My teams improved sprint planning efforts by a factor or 3, once we started using relative estimation.
Without understanding Agile relative estimation, teams tend to fall back to using time-based methods. This often leads them to spend way too much time on obsolete estimates that will be made even more complex with all the unknowns and constant emergent requirements of an Agile world!
“It's better to be roughly right, than precisely wrong!”
~ John Maynard Keyenes
The Solution is simple: understand that relative estimation is only a rough order of magnitude estimate to quickly organize the product backlog. This empowers your product owners (PO) to quickly make value based trade-offs on backlog items and decide on what stories the team should work next. This gives the business the highest bang for their buck!
PROBLEMS WITH TIME-BASED ESTIMATES
-Teams spend too much time trying to get it right
-Lack of confidence/experience can lead to people being either optimistic or pessimistic
-Timeline you are estimating may be too far in the future
-Due to long timeline, there are too many risks, unknowns, changes or dependencies!
WHY USE RELATIVE ESTIMATION?
-Allows a quick comparison of stories in the backlog
-Allows you to select a predictable volume of work to do in a sprint
-Uses a simple arbitrary scale
-Allows PO to make trade-offs and take on the most valuable stories next
ESTIMATION TIPS
-Relative points or equivalent Tshirt sizes are used to estimate stories, leveraging the Fibonacci sequence modified for Agile.
-The team estimates the story, not management nor the customer.
-Story estimates account for three things: effort, complexity, and unknowns. Don’t short sell yourself by estimating effort alone, that’s where waterfall projects face issues.
-Remember to estimate all Stories, user stories or technical stories. Even estimate research or discovery spikes.
-Refine your backlog as a team on a continuous basis, to get your stories to meet the Definition of Ready.
-Only pull into your sprint, stories that are refined and estimated.
-Break down stories that are large, into smaller slivers of value to optimize your flow.
-Don’t sweat it if you get it wrong, teams often do early on but improve over time.
Explains the 3 main phases of Agile Transformation identified by the DACH30 exchange group. Contains a definition of the phases of an agile transformation and some glimpses on the education program.
What is Value Stream Management and why do you need it?Tasktop
Agile has provided a framework for shortening iterations and adapting to ever changing requirements. DevOps established practices for automating the software delivery pipeline. While these methods are becoming standard practices in building software, scaling these concepts is problematic. That’s where Value Stream Management (VSM) comes in.
During this webinar, Senior VSM Strategist, Carmen DeArdo, discusses:
- What is Value Stream Management and why you need it
- How to architect your delivery pipeline for end-to-end flow and delivery speed
- Why moving from a project to product approach is critical to survive in the age of digital disruption
modern approaches share a focus on producing exceptional outcomes and growing an outstanding culture. Today, it makes far more sense to bypass antiquated agility in favor of modern approaches.
Modern agile methods are defined by four guiding principles:
- Make people awesome
- Make safety a prerequisite
- Experiment & learn rapidly
- Deliver value continuously
Slides of the 'deep' talk presented @ Agile O'Day 2017 #agileoday on the topic of "Business Agility" - Business agility is the "ability of a business system to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration”
Successfully support the implementation and execution of Program Increments (PI) according to the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe) with Objective Key Results (known from Google)
Scrum as a foundational piece of SAFe(tm) - Give Thanks to Scrum 2016Yuval Yeret
As part of Give Thanks to Scrum's 2016 theme of "Scrum as a foundation for Agile Scaling approaches" Yuval Yeret and Dan Mezick explore how Scrum is a foundational piece of the Scaled Agile Framework(tm) and what is required in order to scale not just Scrum's practices but also its DNA and how SAFe approaches this challenge.
Are you crazy? Using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe and DSDM in one Company!!!Matthew Caine
All four Agile approaches in combination in one company! What a radical thought, especially with the fearsome flames of the agile methodology wars!
It all started with Scrum versus Scrum. Then Scrum versus Kanban. Then everybody against DSDM. And finally late last year things escalated with the global take-up of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).
Sadly dogmatic Agilistas continue to see just one (or two) of the four approaches as the solution to everyones’ problems. Despite the fact that no single one can be the silver bullet.
Yet despite this dogmatism, Agile and Lean has made a massive difference to people’s lives. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of IT professionals and hobbyists benefit daily from these approaches. So we must put our ego to one side and remember that the approaches are not about a particular methodology: They are about people and results.
By putting people and results first we can illustrate in this session why, how and where all four approaches (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe & DSDM) are applicable. Incredibly we will see that a particular type of organization should consider all four!
To support this discussion, we will examine different types of organization, each with their own set of characteristics. For each we will explore which approaches would be the most appropriate now and in the future plus risks.
Session Abstract:
Agile framework is based on iterative development, where requirements and solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing cross-functional teams. It’s a set of values and principles that help teams respond to unpredictability through incremental, iterative work cadences and continuous feedback.
Scrum is the most popular methodology under the Agile umbrella. Scrum emphasizes empirical feedback, team self-management, and striving to build shippable product increments within short iterations.
Kanban is another popular flavor of Agile that focuses on visualizing and managing the flow of work, in order to balance demand with available capacity and remove bottlenecks.
Learning Objectives:
> Gain a broad understanding of the Agile framework
> Discover Scrum and Kanban, the two most widely used Agile methodologies, and see how they can be used in construction industry
> Find out how Scrum and Kanban can be combined to have the best of both worlds (Scrumban)
The Scrum Master and the Product Owner are critical to success of agile development teams using Scrum with the authority to make changes to the process, suggest team members take action, and empower members to do tasks correctly, in support of increasing the probability of project success.
Ever wondered how Agile can be implemented in larger organisation/project. SAFe is the answer. In this session we will understand the core principles and values that is require to implement SAFe in larger organisation.
Product Backlog - Refinement and Prioritization TechniquesVikash Karuna
This presentation describes the important techniques used in Product Backlog refinement and prioritization in Agile development. The various techniques described here are very useful for product managers, product owners, scrum masters, and agile teams.
Updated with latest version as presented at the Canberra Agile & Scrum meetup on July 20, 2017. Previously titled "Using Agile techniques to manage risk more effectively".
Given that the "Waterfall" process model has been dominant in the IT industry for many decades, how many IT and project management professionals are aware that it's inventor warned the world in 1970 that Waterfall is "risky and invites failure"?
From a risk management perspective, is waterfall ever an appropriate choice for complex IT initiatives given what we know now?
In this session we will outline how, as a risk management strategy, using the waterfall model for non-trivial systems development initiatives is systemically high risk as compared with the Iterative Incremental Development (IID) model that has been used in pockets of the IT industry since the late 1950's. Today, many organisations use the IID strategy under the umbrella term of 'Agile'. The majority of these employ Lean Product Development patterns that were first described in the Harvard Business Review in 1986 using a metaphor borrowed from the game of rugby i.e. 'Scrum'.
If you are not using a disciplined agile approach, are you facing more risk as you approach a high-stakes deadline than you need to?
The varied contexts that we work in come with varied types of risk. For a green fields date-driven release, the primary risk may be cost and schedule related. For teams designing a new product for an emerging market, the primary risks may be business risk. For teams doing innovative R&D, the primary risk may technical risk. For a young team in a new technical or business domain, the primary risk may be social risk. In this session, we will use real world examples of such varied challenges to illustrate how risk-tuned Agile helped us to manage risk effectively.
Whilst we will always have to deal with risk to create value, the good news is that there are now many powerful risk management techniques that can be overlaid on top of IID to tune your development process to the type of risk you face. The question is: which ones are most appropriate for the type of risk you are facing? In this workshop we outline a series of powerful risk management tools that tune an agile development process to effectively manage the type of risk that you face.
Ever wonder why Agile teams swear by relative estimation? My teams improved sprint planning efforts by a factor or 3, once we started using relative estimation.
Without understanding Agile relative estimation, teams tend to fall back to using time-based methods. This often leads them to spend way too much time on obsolete estimates that will be made even more complex with all the unknowns and constant emergent requirements of an Agile world!
“It's better to be roughly right, than precisely wrong!”
~ John Maynard Keyenes
The Solution is simple: understand that relative estimation is only a rough order of magnitude estimate to quickly organize the product backlog. This empowers your product owners (PO) to quickly make value based trade-offs on backlog items and decide on what stories the team should work next. This gives the business the highest bang for their buck!
PROBLEMS WITH TIME-BASED ESTIMATES
-Teams spend too much time trying to get it right
-Lack of confidence/experience can lead to people being either optimistic or pessimistic
-Timeline you are estimating may be too far in the future
-Due to long timeline, there are too many risks, unknowns, changes or dependencies!
WHY USE RELATIVE ESTIMATION?
-Allows a quick comparison of stories in the backlog
-Allows you to select a predictable volume of work to do in a sprint
-Uses a simple arbitrary scale
-Allows PO to make trade-offs and take on the most valuable stories next
ESTIMATION TIPS
-Relative points or equivalent Tshirt sizes are used to estimate stories, leveraging the Fibonacci sequence modified for Agile.
-The team estimates the story, not management nor the customer.
-Story estimates account for three things: effort, complexity, and unknowns. Don’t short sell yourself by estimating effort alone, that’s where waterfall projects face issues.
-Remember to estimate all Stories, user stories or technical stories. Even estimate research or discovery spikes.
-Refine your backlog as a team on a continuous basis, to get your stories to meet the Definition of Ready.
-Only pull into your sprint, stories that are refined and estimated.
-Break down stories that are large, into smaller slivers of value to optimize your flow.
-Don’t sweat it if you get it wrong, teams often do early on but improve over time.
Explains the 3 main phases of Agile Transformation identified by the DACH30 exchange group. Contains a definition of the phases of an agile transformation and some glimpses on the education program.
What is Value Stream Management and why do you need it?Tasktop
Agile has provided a framework for shortening iterations and adapting to ever changing requirements. DevOps established practices for automating the software delivery pipeline. While these methods are becoming standard practices in building software, scaling these concepts is problematic. That’s where Value Stream Management (VSM) comes in.
During this webinar, Senior VSM Strategist, Carmen DeArdo, discusses:
- What is Value Stream Management and why you need it
- How to architect your delivery pipeline for end-to-end flow and delivery speed
- Why moving from a project to product approach is critical to survive in the age of digital disruption
modern approaches share a focus on producing exceptional outcomes and growing an outstanding culture. Today, it makes far more sense to bypass antiquated agility in favor of modern approaches.
Modern agile methods are defined by four guiding principles:
- Make people awesome
- Make safety a prerequisite
- Experiment & learn rapidly
- Deliver value continuously
Slides of the 'deep' talk presented @ Agile O'Day 2017 #agileoday on the topic of "Business Agility" - Business agility is the "ability of a business system to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration”
Successfully support the implementation and execution of Program Increments (PI) according to the Scaled Agile Framework® (SAFe) with Objective Key Results (known from Google)
Scrum as a foundational piece of SAFe(tm) - Give Thanks to Scrum 2016Yuval Yeret
As part of Give Thanks to Scrum's 2016 theme of "Scrum as a foundation for Agile Scaling approaches" Yuval Yeret and Dan Mezick explore how Scrum is a foundational piece of the Scaled Agile Framework(tm) and what is required in order to scale not just Scrum's practices but also its DNA and how SAFe approaches this challenge.
Are you crazy? Using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe and DSDM in one Company!!!Matthew Caine
All four Agile approaches in combination in one company! What a radical thought, especially with the fearsome flames of the agile methodology wars!
It all started with Scrum versus Scrum. Then Scrum versus Kanban. Then everybody against DSDM. And finally late last year things escalated with the global take-up of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).
Sadly dogmatic Agilistas continue to see just one (or two) of the four approaches as the solution to everyones’ problems. Despite the fact that no single one can be the silver bullet.
Yet despite this dogmatism, Agile and Lean has made a massive difference to people’s lives. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of IT professionals and hobbyists benefit daily from these approaches. So we must put our ego to one side and remember that the approaches are not about a particular methodology: They are about people and results.
By putting people and results first we can illustrate in this session why, how and where all four approaches (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe & DSDM) are applicable. Incredibly we will see that a particular type of organization should consider all four!
To support this discussion, we will examine different types of organization, each with their own set of characteristics. For each we will explore which approaches would be the most appropriate now and in the future plus risks.
Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) is scaling framework created by Craig Larman and Bas Vodde. I Presented a case study on LeSS to PlayScrum-Pune user group on 7th Nov.
Agile development works well in small teams. But we encounter problems when Scrum is applied to other teams and the rest of the organisation. Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) can help. This slide deck explains why.
Salesforce.com is an enterprise Cloud Computing Leader that specializes in Software as a Service. With several hundred teams working on our diverse product suite, releasing three times a year is not an easy endeavor. Our Agile processes are the key to our success. In this deck, learn the 5 fundamental elements of our successful enterprise implementation of Agile software development methodologies.
A simple formula for becoming Lean, Agile and unlocking high performance teamsRowan Bunning
An extended version of the session at the Sydney Scrum User Group, Agile Brisbane, Melbourne Agile and Scrum User Group and Agile Newcastle between Feb 26 and Mar 20, 2013. This included a promo about the Scrum Australia 2013 conference: http://www.scrum.com.au
Session Intro
In an effort to become Agile and/or Lean, many organisations in Australia are attempting to design their own custom Agile process from Agile and Lean principles at the time at which they are least qualified to do so - before they have started.
This might appear to make sense if you set out to 'implement the Agile Methodology' * or 'do Agile' *. After all, aren't you acting in the adaptable spirit of Agile to pick and choose which practices you adopt and how you implement them? Every organisation is unique, right?
In reality, organisations taking this approach, tend to pick the easy 'low hanging fruit' that are easy for them to adopt over those that offer the most improvement over the status quo. In pulling up stumps early and 'wimping out' of the harder organisational changes, such organisations unconsciously stifle their teams' ability to reach for high performance and limit the organisation's ability to go beyond "good" to be truly "great". They may also be missing the essential understanding that Agile practices were designed to work as an inter-dependent system of disciplined practice. As Kent Beck put it: "No single practice works well by itself, each needs the other practices to keep them in balance. If you follow 80% of the process you get 20% of the benefits."
If, however, you set out to be a high performing organisation, this may not be adequate.
So...
What if there was a way to avoid a half-baked 'Agile-ish' approach producing half-baked outcomes? What if you could get there by "standing on the shoulders of giants"?
What if there were a simple formula for becoming truly Agile?
(Genuinely living the Agile Software Development values and principles.)
What if this simple formula also implicitly implemented the core principles of Lean and did so in a way based not on repetitive Lean Manufacturing of physical objects but on a type of Lean that is much more appropriate for complex knowledge work and systems development?
What if this formula also implemented the management/leadership approaches suggested for a Complex problem domain as per the Cynefin framework?
What if this formula enabled rapid cycles of learning about both:- what the customer really needs and- what techniques are required to rise to the challenge of delivering it using contemporary technologies?
What if this formula was proven to scale and could support you through the Agile Journey from pilot to whole-organisation transformation?
What if this formula was self-correcting in terms of both your project outcome and your processes themselves?
What if there was a way to unlock the full synergistic potential of teams and realise truly high performance?
More with LeSS - An Introduction to Large Scale Scrum by Tim AbbottAgile ME
While there are multiple Scrum Scaling Frameworks, Large Scale Scrum is the leading framework for Scrum Scaling that truly drives success. More than just a prescription, we'll discuss the thinking and organizational tools as well as some of the practices that make LeSS truly unique.
Traditional business models are failing to keep up with the needs of the modern economy. While business has never been predictable, technological and cultural change is occurring at faster rates than ever before. In this climate, modern enterprises live or die on their ability to adapt – which is where Business Agility comes in. Business Agility provides a context for organisations to embrace change; changing how to think, changing how to work and changing how to interact.
Whether you’ve heard of Holocracy or Teal Organisations; it seems that lean and agile business models are gaining interest across different business sectors. This presentation will provide engaging and enlightening stories of Agile beyond IT; from lean startups to large enterprises. These will be reinforced with practical approaches for the design and leadership of teams, divisions and businesses across 4 key domains;
1. The Structure of an Agile Organisation - Efficient, transparent and collaborative techniques to manage cross-functional, self-organising and potentially self-managing teams.
2. You, the Agile Manager - What makes a good agile manager and how do their responsibilities change?
3. Integrated Customer Engagement - Collaboration and communication techniques to build trust and deliver Customer needs efficiently, with minimal waste, and to everyone’s satisfaction.
4. Work, the Agile Way - Managing all types of business functions, from software, HR, finance to legal, by using Just-In-Time planning and incremental or continuous delivery processes.
Genuine agility at scale through LeSS Product Ownership - April 2018Rowan Bunning
Scrum is too often seen as a way for development to deliver faster without concern for agility, customer value optimisation or learning. Whilst there may be a role called “Product Owner”, it may be subordinated to little more than a team-centric SME taking orders from stakeholders and feeding “stories” to a team. In this session, we explore how the LeSS (Large-Scale Scrum) guidance on the Product Owner role can be used to address these problems and achieve scalable agility at a whole of customer-centric product level, no matter how many teams contribute.
Learning objectives:
- Recognise the limitations that you may be experiencing with the Product Owner implementation at your organisation
- Be aware of well proven patterns for scaling the Product Owner role to endeavours involving dozens or hundreds of people
- Be equipped to have an informed conversation about how your organisation can increase agility at scale.
As presented at the Global Scrum Gathering Minneapolis 2018.
Liberating your Teams from Rigid Scope and Date Agreements.pdfRowan Bunning
Liberating your Teams from Rigid Scope and Date Agreements
Q: Do you start initiatives in a complex domain by attempting to answer “what are we going to deliver and when”?
Q: Do internal stakeholders negotiate a scope and date agreement with development and then expected teams to keep “on track” to deliver the agreed deliverables by the agreed date?
Q: Do developers cut corners in order to achieve this?
In this session we will explore how the scope and date-based “Contract Game” is misaligned with Agile as well as Scrum. Also how game theory can help us raise awareness how this competitive game results in many negative outcomes when reality does not go to plan (inevitable in a complex domain). This damage is often unrecognised because it is experience by a different group of people, often much later.
We will also outline how to lead your organisation to the co-operative game aligned with Agile methods. This includes at least 7 specific techniques.
You can expect to walk away with new language and a practical Scrum-based approach for eliminating the Contract Game so that empiricism and agility can thrive.
We've often heard that "Culture eats Strategy for breakfast". Well for years, the largest and longest-running Agile survey has been demonstrating that this is true for Agile adoption as well. The top challenge continues to be "Company philosophy or culture at odds with core agile values".*
With 16 years of working on Agile adoptions in two hemispheres across organisations with widely varying cultures, Rowan sees clear patterns for how culture is shapes Agile in organisations. Not only the style of Agile or pseudo-Agile that you end up with, but even how the concept of Agile itself is framed and perceived.
Given an understanding of your organisational culture, we're coming close to being able to predict how your Agile adoption will play out even before you consider starting! That's unless there is real leadership energy spent on effective cultural change.
In this session we explore crucial questions such as the following for leaders in organisations pursuing Agile.
- What are characteristics of your organisation's culture that are most likely shaping your Agile adoption?
- What is it that your organisation is likely to be misinterpreting about Agile and Scrum given its prevailing culture?
- Why does attempting to adopt good Agile without shifting organisational culture result in either low impact watered down Agile and/or ongoing culture clash?
- Why is Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) so popular in certain sorts of organisations and what are they are missing out on?
- What sorts of changes in belief and behaviour are required of leadership in order to lead a culture change supportive of the phase shift to a higher impact mode of Agile?
- What is it like working in a rare "Agile native" culture?
Time permitting, we'll tell stories of first-hand experience with "Agile native" organisational cultures and what led to them emerging and thriving.
* State of Agile survey: http://stateofagile.versionone.com
Learn more about the most popular Agile framework - Scrum. This training should be paired with the pre-training learning materials in Trello. Learn more about the Scrum artifacts (product backlog, sprint backlog, etc.), Scrum roles (Scrum Master, Product Owner, and the team), and the Sprint.
Who are the certified scrum masters?
An expert recognized by the Scrum Alliance as a Scrum practitioner with the capacity to effectively lead project teams is referred to as a "Certified Scrum Master".
A Scrum Master is a servant leader who helps the team use the Scrum methodology; they are not a project manager or leader.
This is a version of the presentationI delivered last year to the MIH Tech Conference in Prague.
About 2 years after the introduction of Scrum to 24.com I take a look at some of the things we've learned, in particular how to manage innovation in a Scrum environment, and how to use Scrum techniques in non-Scrum teams
aka "Agile adoption stories from highly varied organisational cultures"
Why is the culture change that genuine Agile requires so difficult in most army or machine-like corporate cultures, yet quite natural for certain organisations who have a culture similar to a family or living organism? It turns out that the type of Agile your organisation adopts corresponds with its dominant world view or stage of consciousness. Drawing from 15 years of experience with Agile in Australia and the UK, we describe how Agile was interpreted quite differently by organisations classed as Amber, Orange, Green and Teal in Frederic LaLoux’s model.
Familiarise yourself with the characteristics of the four stages of Frederic LaLoux’s consciousness model.
You will become aware of:
* The stage that your own organisation is at
* How your organisation is likely to interpret and ‘bend’ Agile to fit its world view
* Specific beliefs and motivations that make high agility difficult in organisations with Amber and Orange stages of consciousness
* The Green and Teal beliefs and leadership styles that are genuinely transformational in achieving and sustaining high agility and customer-centric Agile adoptions.
Scrum 101 Learning Objectives:
1. Waterfall project methodology basics - what is waterfall and where did it come from?
2. Agile umbrella practices and frameworks - what is agile? what isn't agile? Where does Scrum fit in?
3. Scrum empirical theory - emperical vs. theoretical
4. Parts of the Scrum framework - roles, events / ceremonies, artifacts and rules
5. Features of cultures that use Scrum
In the past two decades, Scrum has become the standard for agile development, used in some form today by 90 percent of agile teams. As Scrum starts its third decade, it’s not the fresh-faced process framework it once was. Yes, it has met—and dealt with—commercial, technical, philosophical, and practical challenges. Dave West discusses the past, present, and future of Scrum, using real data from more than 200,000 open assessments and 50,000 professional assessments to describe its challenges and evolution. Learn how to: (1) add the development infrastructure for continuous delivery; (2) define the systems engineering to manage the operational requirements from the start; and (3) create architectures to simplify the challenges of large-scale development. Learn how, in an industry that survives on the bleeding edge, there will continue to be a role for Scrum with its events, artifacts, and roles and how Scrum can continue to evolve.
More Agile and LeSS dysfunction - may 2015Rowan Bunning
Whilst becoming proficient at single-team Agile is not easy, scaling to many teams and possibly many sites adds many additional challenges.
Often these challenges include...
1. Water-Scrum-Fall
2. The 'contract game' and its misalignment with "customer collaboration over contract negotiation"
3. Release rigidity - inability to adjust scope and/or release timing in order to maximise value for money
4. Limited visibility and transparency
5. Dependency hell
6. Skills bottlenecks
7. Lack of cross-team learning
8. Lack of design and architectural alignment whilst avoiding 'ivory tower' architecture
9. Inability to resolve organisational mis-alignment issues outside of delivery teams
Not all frameworks marketed as Agile are designed to address these problems.
In this session, we will introduce Large-Scaled Scrum (LeSS) as an organisational design framework and illustrate how it provides solutions to problems that commonly lead to friction, deliver challenges and difficulties realising the benefits of Agile within large programs and product development efforts.
We will outline each organisational dysfunction / scaling challenge, and connect these with the elements of LeSS that avoid the dysfunction or greatly LeSSen the problem
First presented on 7 May 2015 at
Project Management Institute (PMI) Sydney Chapter Meetup
http://www.meetup.com/PMISydneyMeetup/events/219823489/
Presenter: Michael Rudy, Aras
Companies are looking for faster, more iterative ways to implement PLM. Hear how a global technology leader is using the Aras Implementation Methodology, based on the SAFe Agile approach, to rapidly deploy PLM processes worldwide.
Beyond the Scrum Team: Delivering "Done" at ScaleTasktop
In this webinar Dave West, CEO and Product Owner of Scrum.org, and Betty Zakheim, VP of Industry Strategy at Tasktop talk about the success of Scrum in the enterprise and techniques that organizations can employ when they have a large IT shop.
Join us for this discussion of the successes and challenges of Scrum at scale, including:
* Scrum.org's Nexus
* how software development teams can deliver "Done" at scale
* how these techniques fit into the broader software delivery lifecycle
In this introduction to Cadenced Flow, you’ll explore a principled approach for evolving teams no matter which methods they are using, or how far along they are in their journey of becoming more lean or agile. Participants will learn the basic principles that drive team cadence and workflow and then cover practical approaches for improvement, such as how to define and measure work, as well as how to coordinate product delivery. These concepts can be applied across all aspects of organization and all departments to help build a higher performing business overall.
It was repeatedly observed that as the number of Scrum teams within an organization grew, two major issues emerged:
* The volume, speed, and quality of their output (working product) per team began to fall, due to issues such as cross-team dependencies, duplication of work, and communication overhead.
* The original management structure was ineffective for achieving business agility. Issues arose like competing priorities and the inability to quickly shift teams around to respond to dynamic market conditions.
In this presentation I will show you how to counteract these issues, using Scrum@Sclae framework for effectively coordinating multiple Scrum teams was clearly needed which would aim for the following:
* Linear scalability: A corresponding percentage increase in delivery of working product with an increase in the number of teams.
* Business agility: The ability to rapidly respond to change by adapting its initial stable configuration.
Similar to Illuminating the potential of Scrum by comparing LeSS with SAFe (20)
Succeeding with Agile against the odds at Australia's Central BankRowan Bunning
If you were asked to name the sort of organisation at which Agile transformation is most difficult, what would you pick? Government? Banks perhaps? How about an organisation that is both? Is it even possible for a Government Bank to transition an in-flight program to a thriving Agile capability?
In this session we describe how the Reserve Bank of Australia has demonstrated that it is possible to be successful with Agile in an organisational environment in which such a way of working is very foreign. This is the story of transitioning to Scrum and Behaviour Driven Development some months into the bank's largest ever program of work focused on redevelopment of the Banking Departments core banking systems. We outline how we got from test-last waterfall to full Scrum within 3 months, to full-team BDD in 4 months and to a strong collaboration and cultivation culture in 5 months. We describe the key conditions for such an effort to succeed and what we learned along the way.
How can Scrum Masters be effective in a hybrid remote working world?Rowan Bunning
“The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.” - Agile Manifesto
Yet now, for ≈80% of Sprints as everyone is working, we cannot see or even hear the voices of the team.
In this webinar, we will explore what it takes for us and our development teams to succeed in this “new normal” of remote working or hybrid working arrangements.
Agile knowledge check-up: Busting myths on core Agile conceptsRowan Bunning
Does your organisation use terms “Agile”, User Story, MVP, Iteration Manager or ScrumMaster? Do you do a demonstration at the end of each iteration? If you organisation is like most in Australia, it’s likely that people in it are misunderstanding the primary purpose of these concepts. When the main point of such concepts are missed repeatedly, it can cripple the effectiveness of your Agile adoption. Don’t fear, the Doctor is in and there is a clear prescription for your ailment. Come and test your knowledge. Be prepared to be surprised.
In this session we tell stories of post-heroic servant leadership from three cities in two continents that draw out reality and leave people feeling that they achieved breakthrough results themselves. Leadership that broke down barriers (very literally!), eliminated distrust and dysfunction, socialised issues and facilitated decision-making that saved a high-stakes project and transformed the culture to an environment of empowerment and candour.
Using these stories as inspiration, participants identify examples of increasing transparency across widely used Scrum artefacts such as Product Backlog and events such as Sprint Review.
Advancing as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach v2Rowan Bunning
Our Agile adoptions could be more successful if we, as Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches, were more impactful. Achieving this requires a more holistic understanding of these roles plus skilling up to be more effective at fulfilling them. That starts with us.
In many organisations, a Scrum Master is seen as just a team facilitator. Often only superficial elements of the role are played part-time by an already busy team member. If there are full-time Scrum Masters, in many organisations they are rendered ineffective as change agents and capability builders. Their capacity is filled by a heavy load of co-ordination, stakeholder meetings, progress tracking and other project management tasks have been left to Scrum Masters in the absence of a project manager or the implementation of effective Scrum alternatives.
If this sounds like you, or someone you know, this session is for you!
At the heart of this appears to be a fundamental lack of understanding as to what the Scrum Master role is all about. Also a failure for Scrum Masters to explain their role in the context of the new mindsets and demonstrate its worth to teams, Product Owners, management and other stakeholders.
This interactive session aims to open your eyes to see what a Scrum Master is really meant to be and full impact that a Scrum Master can make.
Five leadership lenses for agile successRowan Bunning
Sense Making lens - what is the problem contexts and appropriate management approach?
Systems Thinking lens - what should our organisation be optimised for and what are the dynamics?
Lean Thinking lens - how is our org. design relative to a customer value focus?
Cultural Analysis lens - what are our implicit beliefs shaping behaviour?
Self-Leadership lens - how do I show up as a leader to deal with complexity?
As presented at #sglon18
Advancing as a Scrum Master or Agile CoachRowan Bunning
Iteration 2 presented at the Melbourne Agile and Scrum User Group - July 23, 2018
In many organisations, ScrumMaster is seen as just a team facilitator and played part-time by an already busy team member. If there are full-time ScrumMasters, in many organisations they are rendered ineffective as change agents and capability builders. Their capacity is filled by a heavy load of co-ordination, stakeholder meetings, progress tracking and other project management tasks have been left to ScrumMasters in the absence of a project manager or the implementation of effective Scrum alternatives.
Many organisations continue to creating conflicts of interest by combining ScrumMaster and Project Manager into the one role. Or undermine the Development Team and Product Owner roles by attempting to blend ScrumMaster with a Delivery Manager role. Or they just get rid of ScrumMasters altogether have a sparse scattering of seagull “Agile Coaches”. Why? …well Spotify!
Are any of these wise moves?
At the heart of this appears to be a fundamental misunderstanding of what the ScrumMaster role is all about. Also a failure for ScrumMasters to explain their role in the context of the new mindset and demonstrate its worth to teams, Product Owners, management and other stakeholders.
In this interactive session, we explore what the ScrumMaster role really encompasses. We look at ways in which it is a lot more substantive and potentially impactful that many people realise. Ways in which a good ScrumMaster acts as a human mirror, shortens feedback loops, brings reality to bare, catalyses change, models behaviour, teaches people skills, cultivates culture, manages conflict, builds team performance, leads product thinking, builds product ownership capability, teaches other managers Lean, Agile and Systems Thinking plus “higher consciousness” leadership skills, provides mentoring to individuals, helps reveal the organisation’s dynamics to itself, advocates for impediment removal and helps all around them to better solve their own problems. All of this from a post-heroic and situationally appropriate leadership stance, being committed to the value creation gemba, to long term capability growth and optimising the whole. Just a meeting facilitator or a progress tracking secretary they are not!
When you think of all that, it’s not surprising that we’re not able to demonstrate the full impact of the ScrumMaster role – all of this takes years, if not decades to master.
You will explore what your own strengths and weaknesses are as ScrumMaster or capability growth leader and present opportunities for professional growth in these areas. You will take away specific points that you can use to explain the ScrumMaster role to colleagues as well as what the likely trade-off are when combining or replacing it with other roles.
A simple formula for becoming Lean, Agile and unlocking high performance team...Rowan Bunning
In an effort to become Agile and/or Lean, many organisations in Australia are attempting to design their own custom Agile process from Agile and Lean principles at the time at which they are least qualified to do so - before they have started.
This might appear to make sense if you set out to 'implement the Agile Methodology' * or 'do Agile' *. After all, aren't you acting in the adaptable spirit of Agile to pick and choose which practices you adopt and how you implement them? Every organisation is unique, right?
In reality, organisations taking this approach, tend to pick the easy 'low hanging fruit' that are easy for them to adopt over those that offer the most improvement over the status quo. In pulling up stumps early and 'wimping out' of the harder organisational changes, such organisations unconsciously stifle their teams' ability to reach for high performance and limit the organisation's ability to go beyond "good" to be truly "great". They may also be missing the essential understanding that Agile practices were designed to work as an inter-dependent system of disciplined practice. As Kent Beck put it: "No single practice works well by itself, each needs the other practices to keep them in balance. If you follow 80% of the process you get 20% of the benefits."
If, however, you set out to be a high performing organisation, this may not be adequate.
So...
What if there was a way to avoid a half-baked 'Agile-ish' approach producing half-baked outcomes? What if you could get there by "standing on the shoulders of giants"?
What if there were a simple formula for becoming truly Agile?
(Genuinely living the Agile Software Development values and principles.)
What if this simple formula also implicitly implemented the core principles of Lean and did so in a way based not on repetitive Lean Manufacturing of physical objects but on a type of Lean that is much more appropriate for complex knowledge work and systems development?
What if this formula also implemented the management/leadership approaches suggested for a Complex problem domain as per the Cynefin framework?
What if this formula enabled rapid cycles of learning about both:- what the customer really needs and- what techniques are required to rise to the challenge of delivering it using contemporary technologies?
What if this formula was proven to scale and could support you through the Agile Journey from pilot to whole-organisation transformation?
What if this formula was self-correcting in terms of both your project outcome and your processes themselves?
What if there was a way to unlock the full synergistic potential of teams and realise truly high performance?
A series of ScrumBut anti-patterns observed in multiple Scrum projects along with guidance on how to avoid them.
As presented at the European Scrum Gathering (Munich, Germany) on October 19, 2009.
Specific ServPoints should be tailored for restaurants in all food service segments. Your ServPoints should be the centerpiece of brand delivery training (guest service) and align with your brand position and marketing initiatives, especially in high-labor-cost conditions.
408-784-7371
Foodservice Consulting + Design
Comparing Stability and Sustainability in Agile SystemsRob Healy
Copy of the presentation given at XP2024 based on a research paper.
In this paper we explain wat overwork is and the physical and mental health risks associated with it.
We then explore how overwork relates to system stability and inventory.
Finally there is a call to action for Team Leads / Scrum Masters / Managers to measure and monitor excess work for individual teams.
The Team Member and Guest Experience - Lead and Take Care of your restaurant team. They are the people closest to and delivering Hospitality to your paying Guests!
Make the call, and we can assist you.
408-784-7371
Foodservice Consulting + Design
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers new opportunities to radically reinvent the way we do business. This study explores how CEOs and top decision makers around the world are responding to the transformative potential of AI.
The case study discusses the potential of drone delivery and the challenges that need to be addressed before it becomes widespread.
Key takeaways:
Drone delivery is in its early stages: Amazon's trial in the UK demonstrates the potential for faster deliveries, but it's still limited by regulations and technology.
Regulations are a major hurdle: Safety concerns around drone collisions with airplanes and people have led to restrictions on flight height and location.
Other challenges exist: Who will use drone delivery the most? Is it cost-effective compared to traditional delivery trucks?
Discussion questions:
Managerial challenges: Integrating drones requires planning for new infrastructure, training staff, and navigating regulations. There are also marketing and recruitment considerations specific to this technology.
External forces vary by country: Regulations, consumer acceptance, and infrastructure all differ between countries.
Demographics matter: Younger generations might be more receptive to drone delivery, while older populations might have concerns.
Stakeholders for Amazon: Customers, regulators, aviation authorities, and competitors are all stakeholders. Regulators likely hold the greatest influence as they determine the feasibility of drone delivery.
Public Speaking Tips to Help You Be A Strong Leader.pdfPinta Partners
In the realm of effective leadership, a multitude of skills come into play, but one stands out as both crucial and challenging: public speaking.
Public speaking transcends mere eloquence; it serves as the medium through which leaders articulate their vision, inspire action, and foster engagement. For leaders, refining public speaking skills is essential, elevating their ability to influence, persuade, and lead with resolute conviction. Here are some key tips to consider: https://joellandau.com/the-public-speaking-tips-to-help-you-be-a-stronger-leader/
Senior Project and Engineering Leader Jim Smith.pdfJim Smith
I am a Project and Engineering Leader with extensive experience as a Business Operations Leader, Technical Project Manager, Engineering Manager and Operations Experience for Domestic and International companies such as Electrolux, Carrier, and Deutz. I have developed new products using Stage Gate development/MS Project/JIRA, for the pro-duction of Medical Equipment, Large Commercial Refrigeration Systems, Appliances, HVAC, and Diesel engines.
My experience includes:
Managed customized engineered refrigeration system projects with high voltage power panels from quote to ship, coordinating actions between electrical engineering, mechanical design and application engineering, purchasing, production, test, quality assurance and field installation. Managed projects $25k to $1M per project; 4-8 per month. (Hussmann refrigeration)
Successfully developed the $15-20M yearly corporate capital strategy for manufacturing, with the Executive Team and key stakeholders. Created project scope and specifications, business case, ROI, managed project plans with key personnel for nine consumer product manufacturing and distribution sites; to support the company’s strategic sales plan.
Over 15 years of experience managing and developing cost improvement projects with key Stakeholders, site Manufacturing Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Maintenance, and facility support personnel to optimize pro-duction operations, safety, EHS, and new product development. (BioLab, Deutz, Caire)
Experience working as a Technical Manager developing new products with chemical engineers and packaging engineers to enhance and reduce the cost of retail products. I have led the activities of multiple engineering groups with diverse backgrounds.
Great experience managing the product development of products which utilize complex electrical controls, high voltage power panels, product testing, and commissioning.
Created project scope, business case, ROI for multiple capital projects to support electrotechnical assembly and CPG goods. Identified project cost, risk, success criteria, and performed equipment qualifications. (Carrier, Electrolux, Biolab, Price, Hussmann)
Created detailed projects plans using MS Project, Gant charts in excel, and updated new product development in Jira for stakeholders and project team members including critical path.
Great knowledge of ISO9001, NFPA, OSHA regulations.
User level knowledge of MRP/SAP, MS Project, Powerpoint, Visio, Mastercontrol, JIRA, Power BI and Tableau.
I appreciate your consideration, and look forward to discussing this role with you, and how I can lead your company’s growth and profitability. I can be contacted via LinkedIn via phone or E Mail.
Jim Smith
678-993-7195
jimsmith30024@gmail.com