In my work, I draw on models, frameworks, and years of experience. Yet, one of my most valuable tools is a simple one: Curiosity. In an early meeting with a client, a senior manager expressed his frustration that development teams weren’t meeting his schedule....
When people set out to change their organizational system, they think about the desired future state. But they don’t give sufficient attention to what is. I call this blindspot the forgotten questions of change. However, change starts from where you are. You...
Captured from my keynote, Still No Silver Bullets, at Big Apple Scrum Day, May 17, 2016. The 7 Ps for Profound Change. I’d add an 8th question: What do you want to preserve?
Many problems are easier to solve when you have data. However, there is a difference between having data and using data. Several years ago, I worked wit an organization that was experiencing system outages. After months of outages and no effective action, they...
What does your product do? When it gets dark, I turn on a light. I can work, cook, read—long after sundown. I can see where I’m going, avoid the dog toys on the floor, and not run into furniture. If I need something that’s in the house, I can find it. The simple flip...
Managers who have invested effort and money in training teams in Agile methods want to see team improvement–reasonable enough. I describe a handful of measures that indicate the organization is improving over all in posts( here and here. Some of these...
Someone I don’t know offered to teach me Agile Best Practices recently. I tend to think there are “generally good practices,” some of which are broadly applicable. In my experience, the search for Best Practices is often a search for Silver Bullets,...
Someone posed the question: Has Agile crossed the chasm?– a reference to Moore’s work on marketing. Agile is no longer the prevue of pioneers and visionaries. Agile shows up in the popular business press. PMI is all over it. The big...
Improvement requires three factors: Information. People need information about the context and how their work fits into the big picture. They need information from the work so they can self-correct. Without this information, systematic improvement is impossible. A...
We all have filters. That’s a good thing–our cognitive systems can’t process all the data that’s available. But most people filter out useful information as well as extraneous information (for example, the size of loops in the carpet or shoe...
