Category Archives: Agile

Empathy, Trust, & Agile

Empathy, Trust, & Agile: What Valentine’s Day Teaches Us About Collaboration Editor’s Note:Reader Beware: If you thrive in a workplace where chaos reigns, backstabbing is a team sport, and showing kindness is considered a sign of weakness, this article may cause severe discomfort. To save precious minutes that could be spent sharpening your metaphorical daggers, feel free to skip ahead to something more suited to your, uh, unique leadership style. For everyone else—let’s talk about how Agile...

New Year Blog

Happy New Year! Every year I, and many others, try to set up resolutions which we tend to fail at after a very short period of time. As an agile coach, I find myself needing to practice what I preach (AKA eating my own dog food), especially when it comes to working iteratively and empirically along with embracing change. As workers, we need to consider who our customers are and how we can better serve them, focused on delivering the most value. Even on the home front there is room for...

Our Future AI Overlord’s Take on Agile

Our Future AI Overlord’s Take on Agile ChatGPT is one of those things I see popping up more and more in my newsfeed and various social media platforms. Out of morbid curiosity about the potential benevolence of our future AI overlords, I decided to see what it had to say about agile. I typed in the following prompt: “Briefly describe how to successfully implement an agile transformation.” I was pleasantly surprised by the AI’s response. Below are the five keys to a successful agile...

Agile Mindset: The Biggest Impediment to...

Agile Mindset: The Biggest Impediment to... The 2022 Agile Coaching Report sat in my inbox for almost two months until I finally reviewed it in detail a few days ago. Several areas were worthy of a deeper dive, but one particularly struck me. The report's preface reads: "Notably, coaches believe the biggest impact they are making is in shifting an organization towards an agile mindset and culture. Interestingly, they also find this to be the most challenging shift to make and one of the biggest...

Agile Mastery Begins with Personal Mastery

Are You the Ideal Candidate to Lead Agile Change? The concept of Agile tends to be overrun with buzzwords, but the key is truly about focusing on one thing--Having the right mindset. Before someone can become an agile master, it’s important for them to take a step back and determine if they are willing to become a leader of change.

Three Things Not to Worry about in your Digital Transformation

A common question for leadership is… What keeps you up at night? I hear it asked all the time. And the reactions run the gamut from thoughtful and deeply reflective to reactive and highly emotional. One of the common factors I nearly always hear is fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Which is why I wanted to share this article with leaders considering or engaging in a Digital Transformation. I’ll begin with three things that are often misconstrued and cause sleeplessness on the part of many...

Zombie Scrum Pitfalls & How to Avoid Them

What is Zombie Scrum? Example #1: Zombie Scrum Standup (Standup Led by the ScrumZombie) Example #2: Scrum Zombie and the Lack of Sprint Goals Example #3: Sprint Review and Retrospective Zombies That’s a Scrum Zombie Wrap! Once again, I have the pleasure of welcoming October. Soon it will be cooler and more colorful here in North Carolina. The holidays are coming, and many of my neighbors have already decorated for Halloween. I have been pondering what sort of ghoulish surprise I could...

Agile Project Management Methodologies

There is some confusion around whatagileis versus what agile methodologies are, and often people lump them together.Agile is a mindset (not a methodology) that encompasses a set ofvalues and principlesthat were compiled by a group of software gurus in 2001. These values focus on customer collaboration, flexibility, a short iterative cycle, value delivery, people centricity, sustainability and simplicity, among other things.These values and principles are not to be confused with the...