Promote Corporate Agility

Post author By Dan Greening
Post date November 15, 2012
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Corporate Agility

Large companies pursuing agility should ask this question: What do we want from agile, and how long do we want it?

As a company, we sustainably adopt continuous-improvement techniques (iterate, measure, reflect, and adapt) everywhere to rapidly identify market need, explore demand, establish product plans, deliver products and delight customers, and support employees, so we gain greater profitability indefinitely.

Agile practices are surprisingly fragile: you can lose them with a manager resignation and/or a bad hire.

Uncategorized

Should we work over 40 hours per week?

Post author By Dan Greening
Post date November 13, 2012
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A colleague recently ask for evidence that 40 hours per week is an optimal work schedule. Here is a document that talks about past studies on “crunch time”, working more than 40 hours a week. It shows that after 4 weeks of crunch time work, productivity declines below the productivity teams had in prior weeks working 40 hours a week.

This result was most recently repeated by High Moon game developers, in 2008, see Snap, Crackle, Crunch Time. However, this just confirms that game development replicates what others have shown for different industries, including Henry Ford about 100 years ago.

See Rules of Productivity for some nice summary slides.

Scrum

Can You Combine Waterfall and Agile?

Post author By Dan Greening
Post date November 8, 2012
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jonarnold

Many well-meaning people think they can be the First Person Ever to combine waterfall and Scrum, name their new process with some catchy name, start teaching this Frankenstein system, then cause internal organizational chaos or sloth.

Enterprise

Enterprise Scrum Thinking: Part 3 of 3

Post author By Dan Greening
Post date October 21, 2012
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Dan Greening explores the challenges of scaling Agile and Scrum concepts beyond the team level to project portfolios with executive involvement. Along the way, he discusses forecasting beyond sprints, commitments vs. lies, dashboard heresy, waterfall compatibility and failing safely, among other thought-provoking ideas. [Part 3: 26 min.]. Interview by Dave Prior at ProjectsAtWork.

Enterprise

Enterprise Scrum Thinking: Part 2 of 3

Post author By Dan Greening
Post date October 20, 2012
1 Comment on Enterprise Scrum Thinking: Part 2 of 3

Dave Prior interviewed me on the topic of Enterprise Scrum Thinking. In the second part of three, I discuss the experimental mindset of an Agile-run project, how a Sprint is like a science experiment on production (we make a hypothesis, test the the hypothesis and learn from the results), and why fear of failure can doom Scrum. I also touch on the concept of Shu-Ha-Ri, stages of mastery that can apply to learning Scrum.

Enterprise

Enterprise Scrum Thinking: Part 1 of 3

Post author By Dan Greening
Post date October 19, 2012
2 Comments on Enterprise Scrum Thinking: Part 1 of 3

In the first of 3 podcasts, I discuss how to spread agile approaches beyond individual teams to the enterprise level, where potential benefits and challenges multiply. In the realm of project portfolio management, decision-making roles can include a Chief Product Owner and Enterprise ScrumMaster.

Tags enterprise scrum, portfolio management, Scrum

Scrum

Bulk Estimation

Estimating lots of work items can help agile teams dramatically: Estimates help Product Owners make trade-offs, help teams gauge capacity, help Product Owner forecast feature releases, and help team members think about architectural issues. However, in too many cases, estimating is painfully boring and slow. It doesn’t have to be.

Continue reading “Bulk Estimation”

Enterprise

Agile Abandonment 2: Root Causes

Post author By Dan Greening
Post date March 6, 2012
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Agile Abandonment Syndrome is a phenomenon where—after implementing agile practices and seeing direct evidence of their benefits—a company stops improving, its agile behaviors degrade, and ultimately loses market share or productivity. We have seen this in many companies.

Advocacy Portfolio Management

Agile Portfolio Management Helps Retain Agility?

Post author By Dan Greening
Post date December 29, 2011
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Abstract

Agile methods create conflict. So to retain agility, we must actively promote it even after agile has taken hold. How can we equip a company with the cultural and process tools to sustain agility? Your choices may depend on your perspective. Social psychologists teach organizations to reinvent themselves, but this approach may be too slow for a large company. Change agents study, develop and evangelize specific processes, a more promising approach. “Adaptive portfolio management” is a specific process under development that may help sustain agile-thinking. It maximizes value by rapidly adapting to market and company changes. In using adaptive portfolio management, company leaders exercise agile fundamentals. They can become agile advocates for the whole organization, making agility more stable for developers on the ground.

Continue reading “Agile Portfolio Management Helps Retain Agility?”

Tags Agile, agile coaching, continuous improvement, portfolio management, product management, Scrum

Uncategorized

Review: Liz Keogh, Learning and Perverse Incentives

Post author By Dan Greening
Post date July 11, 2011
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Liz Heogh

Liz Keogh, Learning and Perverse Incentives: The Evil Hat, QCon London 2011

This 50 minute talk discusses perverse incentives: situations where incentivizing individual behavior causes an organization to become dysfunctional. When we attempt to optimize an organization, but fail to use systems thinking (i.e., when we are optimizing from an internal perspective) we can create inappropriate results.