Forget Kanban, SAFe, LeSS, and even my own system Full Scale agile™ (FuSca™): If you are a manager pondering how to adopt Agile, your direct-report team can be there in just one meeting. Just as quickly, you will become the kind of servant/transformational leader generations of management gurus have talked about, but few managers actually …
Category: Cheap Agile
Cheap Agile: Don’t Hire a Team of Coaches
Multiple times a week it happens: No matter how many ways I try to make clear I am only a solo or lead transformation coach, people contact me about joining the team of Agile coaches in some large company. The worst part is not the waste of my time. The worst part is the waste …
Agile Truths from an “Agile” Project before Agile
I trained four administrative teams to meet the principles of the Agile Manifesto seven years before it was written. Their story busts several myths about Agile that continue to hinder its adoption 25 years later. As mentioned in a recent post, Los Alamos National Laboratory faced a major risk in 1994. Their equipment management system …
Don’t Call the Job “Agile Project Manager”
A Self-Contradicting Job Title Though a free-lancer these days, I keep a few job alerts running just in case something fitting my exacting requirements pops up. Plus, it is a way to monitor what is happening in the real world of Agile versus the theoretical one of blogs and books. One of the biggest indicators …
Cheap Agile:
You Don’t Need Full-Time Scrum Masters
A team with a full-time organizer is not “self-organizing!” My path from technical writer to Agile Coach started at Los Alamos National Laboratory 25 years ago. A new project was framed as a rewrite of a manual. But it became clear this required getting four groups on the same page—pun intended—within and across groups, and …