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
Filed under Agile, Ideas, Scrum | 3 Comments »
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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I used to be a big fan of tools. I still am…..but not as big a fan as I used to be. This changed after I realized the meaning of ‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools’. Especially the “interactions over tools” part. This week’s blog Eat your failure cake! Learn from your mistakes. motivated me to share one of my failure cakes with you.
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Tags: ACT, Agile, metrics, Tools
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Running a great session at the ALE2011 conference last week gave me a great level of energy. Facilitating a story mapping session gave me a great boost of confidence. Running a similar session in a different context with a different group toke that confidence away. By eating my failure cake I was able to celebrate my failing and opened my eye to enable me to learn from the failure.
In Agile methods focus on short feedback cycles and regular delivery of (business) value. Both are supported by having short lead times. Kanban is one of the tools to manage the flow of tasks and reduce lead times.
This article shows how to reduce lead times even further.
One of the mechanisms in Kanban to manage flow is to explicitly set a limit on the amount of work in progress for a process step. By modifying this to include part of the next process step, this article shows that the amount of work in progress is limited more and therefore also lead times are reduced.
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Agile Coaching is about guiding a person, team or organization towards more Agility.
Based upon the subject of coaching, there are 4 types of Agile Coaching
Based upon the main focus a coach applies, 2 more types can be distinguished.
Focus and subject are to be combined into 8 types of coaching.
In a successful Agile implementation all types of coaching add value
Tags: ACT, Agile
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I regularly run workshops to highlight certain aspects of an agile way of working and to help participants achieve a deeper understanding of these topics. I would like to share two of best received workshop sessions with you so that you can run them too. Today I’m describing the “Think Left” workshop.
During the “Think Left” workshop participants will work with the four values of the Agile Manifesto to gain a deeper understanding. In small groups each of the values will be worked on in a peer brainstorming fashion to better understand each of them. As a result of the workshop participants will realize that acting more on the left side or more on the right side of the Agile Manifesto is a choice.
Tags: ACT, Agile
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