Navigate successfully with these 4 considerations and get it to a safe harbour — Javier is an agile transformation coach leading a major initiative around business agility in a large global enterprise. The program has the blessings of senior executives and is well funded. Yet it struggles, and Javier often feels like the captain of a ship in the middle of a storm. The…

A purely quantitative targets-based approach sets up teams to compete with each other instead of creating a culture of trust and collaboration. There might be a better way. — I worked for a large financial services client on a year-long assignment a few years ago. It was complex development work, with everyone focused on improving the predictability and productivity of the teams. Regulatory deadlines, tricky business flows, unpredictable team dynamics and a complex multi-vendor environment made it difficult for…

Model-based thinking requires training the mind, most notably developing an ability to stop and think. Personally, looking through the lens of a particular model often led me to a much better understanding of the problems and sometimes even redefining the problem itself. …

Concrete Steps you can take as a Leader to help your organisation leap towards agility. — Organizational change has always been a challenging task. The process of starting something new often leads to uncertainty and insecurity. More so, when the end state after the change is not fully comprehended. Such situations are often the case in large-scale enterprise agile transformations. Leading people through such times is…

Complexity is why agile is so easy to understand but challenging to implement. A better appreciation of how complex systems work learning to manage them instead of forcing control helps. In Appreciating the Complexity, we discussed how large IT projects qualify as complex adaptive systems. Appreciating our systems and acknowledging…

Complexity and Sense Making fundamentals for Agile Coaches — Frameworks towards agile (and these days business agility) ultimately aim to establish efficiency, alignment and homogeneity in the organisation. Are these worthy goals, though? Is agility the only goal for an organisation, or is it essential to ensure that they are resilient and anti-fragile too? Does homogeneity stand in the…

One of the 12 principles in the agile manifesto states: The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation. However given the distributed nature of the world we live in, is it always possible or practical to form co-located development teams…

Mindset, or rather a lack of it, is often cited as the core reason that Agile implementations struggle. Well, they “never fail” technically — at least on the PowerPoint. However, there is no agility. The situation pre and post-transformation is more or less the same — with new terminologies inducted and everyone around cribbing that we have everything except the “agile mindset”. — What is mindset?