Net als in 2010 heeft Xebia in 2011 het jaarlijks onderzoek naar de de status van Agile in Nederland uitgevoerd. Met ook dit jaar weer opvallende resultaten. Zo zegt bijna 90 procent van de bedrijven die met Agile werken sterk verbeterde resultaten te realiseren bij hun (ICT) projecten. De vraagt die direct bij mij opkomt bij dit soort hoge percentages is waarom niet iedereen met Agile aan de slag gaat.
Daarnaast ervaart 83 procent van de Nederlandse bedrijven die Agile werken hebben geadopteerd, meer werkplezier en 85 procent meer teammotivatie. Dit percentage is aanzienlijk hoger dan vorig jaar, toen gaf driekwart van de respondenten aan meer werkplezier en teammotivatie te ervaren. Dus de mensen die Agile werken varen er wel bij, naar mijn mening een van de belangrijkste redenen voor het succes van Agile. Dit komt ook veelal tot uiting in een lager ziekteverzuim en grotere loyaliteit naar de werkgever toe.
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Tags: 2011, Agile, agile project, generatie y, generatie z, jong talent, Scrum, survey, Xebia
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How do you change the way you live or work? Many people, and companies, seem to think it’s enough to adopt just one or two practices. While they continue their old habits, too. Will this lead you to your desired outcome? Or will you just get frustrated?
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Scaling the productowner (PO) role is tricky business. When you scale up too much within the same context, things become cumbersome. We don’t want to bring back the same centralized fear ridden ineffective decision making climate, we tried to kill off in the first place. When people spend so much time and effort to bring back entrepreneurship, they don’t want to create layer over layer of hierarchical PO/CPO relationships.
So if there is this perceived risk of fallback involved, why do we actually want to scale the PO role at all?
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Tags: ACT, Agile, product owner, productowner, scaling, Scrum
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My motto regarding innovation is: being a first mover is a strategic choice, moving fast isn’t. Agile and scrum can help you move fast, so how can it accommodate innovation?
Tags: ACT, Agile, innovation, innovative agile, product owner, Scrum
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A walking skeleton as meant in scrum is not always feasible. That’s the first sentence of one of my previous blogs. This one starts the same but approaches the subject from a different angle. The angle here is that we teach people to make story maps based on personas; the user, administrator and so on, but we don’t actually take into account that the product has to be bought by someone and how that decision actually works. This blog post tries to tie complex buying decisions into story mapping, to find the shortest route to a sellable Frankenstein, rather than a mere bag ‘o bones.
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Tags: ACT, Agile, product owner, Scrum, story-map, storymap, storymapping
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When I start a new consulting job at an organization, I like to ask people how their organization became the organization it is today. Most of the time, people start telling me about the history of their organization or the values and goals they have. People sometimes start telling me about the people who work in the organization. But I have never got an answer that fullfilled my question completely. What made organizations what they are right now? After reading ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ written by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), I got an answer that could help me structure all the answers people gave to me. (more…)
Tags: ACT, Agile
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I am convinced that the next blue ocean of agile minds can be found in the creation of sharing ecosystems that are built on shared purpose, trust, intuition and a facilitation of the deeply wired human urge to cooperate as a collective. Understanding that modern day individualism is smothering our effectiveness is a catalyst for our drive to start working together and forming the effectiveness of these systems.
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Tags: ACT, Agile
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Imagine you are playing a game of rugby against some blacksuited guys who are doing some odd dancing and screaming exercise before you finally get to start playing. You win the game 27 – 3. You can imagine it wasn’t just one beer at the big party after the match and you did not see home before early morning. A year later your team finds itself in the same stadium against the same guys, doing the same little piece of folk dancing, just a little louder than last year. This time you win 27 – 6, only. The coach and the crowd are going mad: your team lost half of its performance in just a year time! You take a shower, no beers, go home and go to bed early. Measuring the improvement in performance is easy! How about Scrum teams? ….
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Last week I joined the QA&TEST conference in the beautiful town of Bilbao. In this post I’ll give an impression of some of the presentations I attended to and the idea’s I picked up. Most valuable sessions I attended were “Pushing the Boundaries of User Experience” by Julien Harty and “Automated Reliability Testing via hardware interfaces” by Bryan Bakker. Read about it in more detail in the article.
Tags: conference
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A walking skeleton as meant in story-mapping, being the minimal marketable/ shippable feature set, is not always feasible. When working from existing system environments I am quite inclined to argue that in these situations it is often the best route to base your first product slice on risk rather than end-user value, but only if the support is there to enable you.
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Tags: product owner, Scrum, story-map, storymap, storymaps, walking skeleton
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