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How To Stay Compliant Using Agile

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Compliance is a necessary cost that businesses have to accept. After all, it is meant for the good of your business as well as your stakeholders. However, one aspect that makes most startups and established enterprises fear compliance is the price tag it comes with. Even worse, businesses need to comply with more than one regulation, not to mention their own internal policies.

While you will still have to pay the cost of compliance and use the ad hoc resources, the method by which you approach compliance will have a significant role to play on the quality of compliance as well as the cost. Unlike the conventional waterfall approach towards compliance, agile compliance completely revolutionizes how organizations can meet regulatory requirements. Which begs the question, why should you consider agile compliance?

Here is why you should consider agile compliance and the best to approach it:

The Shortcomings Of The Waterfall Approach

At its core, the waterfall approach is a sequential one, whereby compliance projects or tasks need to follow a specific order, often taking more time than necessary to achieve compliance. When using this approach, the intricate compliance details are defined and committed to upfront, even before businesses can identify the real behavior of their systems. This sequential approach is defined by large batches of work, late feedback schedules, and long cycles in between the integration points of the various systems. In most cases, compliance activities might have to be deferred until the projects’ end, creating bottlenecks when it comes to providing insights into the compliance progress.

This method can neither scale nor keep up with the rigid time-to-market demands. For businesses that follow this method, the chances are that you will have significant compliance challenges, experience disappointing outcomes, miss deadlines, and often end up with poor quality projects. Also, compliance risk management is not always at the core of the waterfall approach.

Why Agile Compliance Is An Optimal Solution

Agile compliance approaches ensure incremental quality throughout the development of a project, from the onset to the end. Throughout this process, the necessary compliance activities are added into the mix, making compliance an in-built aspect of product development instead of an afterthought. In the agile approach to compliance, there is a high degree of collaboration, meaning that stakeholders, let alone employees, can voice their opinions on the development of the various tasks. This not only ensures that projects can be designed with the end-user in mind, but it also increases stakeholders’ trust in the development cycle, especially when it comes to ensuring compliance.

Also, the fact that customers and other stakeholders are involved in the development process enhances transparency. They can learn more about how features are prioritized and also be part of the review process. Making changes to the different aspects of development, including compliance, is also quite straightforward, as the method allows teams to refine the quality of a project in real-time continually. This increases the effectiveness in which the development team can use up resources since quality is a priority, and tests are done regularly. Lastly, an agile approach to development reduces the amount of time between the onset of a project to its end.

How To Implement Agile Compliance And Development

Understand The Regulatory Landscape

Before you start any product development, you need to understand the compliance landscape. Ideally, you should know the number of regulations that you need to follow and the nitty-gritty details of how to be compliant. Remember, regulations change from time to time, which is why you need to continuously monitor your compliance landscape for any changes you need to implement.

Enhancing Collaboration Between Teams

For agile compliance to be successful, business leaders need to identify the stakeholders whose input will be necessary during the project. Ideally, they need to work with professionals in the operational, legal, compliance, audit, and risk management departments in collaboration to meet demand. You should consider working with applications that can help to improve communication and enhance collaboration.

As for communication, development teams need to consult the key project stakeholders in good time. They should make the best use of key stakeholders’ time by ensuring that they have done the necessary research and provided the necessary questions for easier communication. The best practices of communication are essential to ensure alignment between operational units and development teams.

Ensure Easy Document Traceability

Without a healthy record of compliance requirements, it can be pretty easy for business units to miss the necessary compliance needs. Even worse, audits will take longer, if any happens, eating into the operational time of your business. Take time to improve the storage and traceability of compliance documentation. Also, ensure that there is enough communication and collaboration between the different business units to ensure that new regulations are followed and any new product releases follow the compliance requirements.

Build A Common Compliance Requirement Repository

The Equifax data breach taught businesses the need to train stakeholders on the need for compliance. Even with a high level of training, however, stakeholders often need a point of reference when indulging in common business operations to ensure that the business remains compliant. Sadly, siloed compliance requirements repositories work against this.Ideally, you should form common repositories that every stakeholder can refer to when the need arises. It should include compliance details such as rules on data confidentiality, authentication, data availability, security, access, logging, and even auditability.

Automating The Compliance Process

Manual compliance is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Even worse, the chances of committing errors throughout a project are quite high. With automation, IT and development teams can increase the speed and quality of a project. At the same time, they can ensure that all the compliance needs are attended to in good time. Also, this will ensure consistency in terms of the outcome of every project as well as eliminate the chances of costly errors occurring. When it comes to testing the projects, it is easier to identify errors and make the ad hoc changes.

The agile approach to compliance is a sure way to mitigate the risk of non-compliance. However, success trickles down to the nitty-gritty details of how you proceed with it. Consider the tips above to improve your business posture compliance wise.

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Kanban, Scrum, XP and Lean, Uncategorized

The Real Relationship Between Scrum & Kanban

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(Image: Cover image of the book Essential Kanban Condensed by David J. Anderson and Andy Carmichael.)

Many people I interact with seem to believe that Kanban is another Agile methodology for helping Agile teams manage their work. The aim of this post is to help people see how Kanban can be so much more.

I am aware that there are some who believe that a high performing, self-organizing, cross-functional Agile team is as good as it gets and that it is the job of Leadership to change the organization such that this kind of team becomes a reality. This is a belief that I also held for many years, during which time I actively advised my clients to pursue this lofty goal and I invested a great deal of time and effort towards helping them achieve it. I understand this belief. It is very powerful, so powerful that it shapes identity. Therefore, it was a big part of my own professional identity and this was not easy for me to change. I empathize with those who struggle in similar ways as I have.

I could go on with my personal story, but I’ll get back to my opening statement. Kanban is so much more than just another Agile methodology. So what does this mean? How can it be so?

In my own experience helping businesses improve for over a decade and from the many stories I’ve listened to of the people I’ve met in my consulting engagements, training classes, conferences and meetups, the ideal of fully cross-functional teams is not a reality, not even a feasible possibility for their organizations and this reality is causing them pain and harm.

Let’s be clear about what we mean by cross-functional teams: According to the Scrum Guide (paraphrasing), a cross-functional team is a team that possesses all the skills required for starting and delivering potentially releasable product increments in a Sprint. A Sprint is a complete project that must be completed in one month or less. Many organizations add to this the idea of establishing stable teams (membership does not change) and Sprints of 1-2 weeks in duration. For many organizations, integrating all of the above is simply not realistic.

Most people I meet who are working with Agile teams (mostly Scrum teams) have already done everything they can to create the conditions for their teams to realize this ideal. Teams are already as “Agile” as they can be under the current constraints. Leaders have already done everything in their power to remove the constraints.

Some would describe this as a “failed Agile transformation”. But it need not be so. Rather, I have begun to see it as a natural stage in some organizations’ maturation process. Perhaps at an organizational level it is analogous to the “Storming” stage of the Tuchman maturity model: “Forming”, “Storming”, “Norming” and “Performing”. Regardless of the best analogy, the important point is that an apparent failed transformation does not have to be a bad thing. It also doesn’t mean you need to start all over again (with another re-org) in the hopes that you will “get it right” the next time. Rather, it is a natural stage of organizational maturation and the frustration, pain and conflict you are experiencing are telling you that your organization has an opportunity to evolve.

Kanban helps organizations move beyond this difficult stage. The Kanban principles of service orientation and evolutionary change help organizations focus on improving survivability of the business and the sustainability of the work. All of the Kanban practices are evolutionary stimulants for whole-organization improvements and they all scale naturally to all levels of an organization.

Kanban can help Scrum teams. Kanban can help with project, program and product management. Kanban can help with portfolio and enterprise services planning and management. Finding ways to implement the practices, little by little, at all levels of your organization will enable your organization to become fitter for the purposes of your customers, fitter for survival.

The Kanban Method, as opposed to other approaches, has built in double loop learning feedback loops. This makes it always contextually appropriate to help any organization. -Martin Aziz

The Kanban Principles:

Change Management Principles:

  • Start with what you do now;
  • Agree to pursue evolutionary change;
  • Encourage acts of leadership at all levels;

Service Delivery Principles:

  • Understand and focus on customer needs and expectations;
  • Manage the work, let people self-organize around it;
  • Evolve policies to improve outcomes.

The Kanban Practices:

  • Visualize the work;
  • Limit work in progress;
  • Manage the flow of work;
  • Make policies explicit;
  • Implement system feedback loops;
  • Improve & evolve with data, models and the scientific method.

 

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Miscellaneous, Uncategorized

Selling Organizational Transformation – Part II

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In Part I, I highlighted the basic importance of proper preparation in anticipation of an impromptu CxO meeting. The aim, of course, is to move up the organizational structure to the decision-makers who are most likely to require a greater portfolio of my services. My background is rooted in helping organizations achieve business agility so that they can better provide services that their customers desire.

If we pick up from the end of Part I, let’s assume I’ve piqued Sarah’s interest. There is a very strong possibility now that CEO Sarah will have an unscheduled, casual ‘elevator’ discussion with Christine about her efforts and perhaps even the work she’s contracting me for.

VP’s, like other Executives, hate surprises. Not knowing their relationship, there is a high probability that things will go south at this point, largely because I’ve potentially introduced risk to Christine and her career. The probability that something is going slightly ‘wrong’ in her portfolio is likely high. And she’s now on the CEO’s radar.

Next steps are obvious – it is imperative for me to speak with Christine, preferably face-to-face. Positioning the conversation is key now. In my experience, this is a “build trust” or “destroy trust” conversation. Prior to that face-to-face, I need to prioritize my talking points, which should be as follows:

  • Confirm the positive impact my team is having with respect to the organizational goals “to drive effectiveness and efficiencies”. Collect the “Yes”.
  • Determine the relationship, if any, she has with her CEO and determine the hierarchy between her and the CEO and, if possible, determine the alignment of their efforts to the CEO’s mandate (there is always a ‘black sheep’ in that mix and it could be Christine’s SVP, or even Christine herself, for instance)
  • Reduce the perceived risk by specifically reiterating the connection between my efforts, Christine’s efforts, and the corporate strategy. Collect the “Yes”.
  • Then, and only then, discuss the brief, impromptu elevator discussion I had with her CEO – and this takes tact and professionalism, and must be delivered with maturity.

My approach and the questions I’d propose, likely would take the following direction:

  • “Christine, what’s your overall ‘take’ on my teams efforts to….? [reiterate the mandate]”.
  • “Does your SVP share those thoughts, and is your leadership in the corporate strategy recognized?”
  • “And are your successes recognized outside of this channel?” [collect the “Yes”]
  • “Christine, you understand the corporate structure here, is there any risk that this project can be derailed, and is it important enough to thrive? Because, I am speaking in hypotheticals right now, but it has to look good for you, correct?” [collect the “Yes”]
  • [This is the tricky part] “Christine, you know part of my role is to champion you, your team and your efforts [insert mandate]. I wanted to meet today because I had the unplanned opportunity to speak briefly with Sarah about this particular project and she was quite keen about the positive work you are doing here. And specifically how it is in-step with the corporate mandate and her strategy. She was fully supportive of such efforts and I wanted to put this on your radar, should the conversation come back to you [pause].
  • “The other part of my job, of course, is to look for additional ways that we can help this organization. If I can help you, help your SVP and help Sarah in this process, then I’d like the opportunity to take a greater role and do so [stop].

I’m not going to walk away with a multi-million dollar contract today, but hopefully I achieved my objectives: clear the potential minefield of risk with Christine, deepen our relationship, gain further understanding of the organizational structure, continue to build trust, show that I am indeed talking with her peers and that I have the best intentions in doing so with her in mind, and I asked for further business.

In sales, we are always looking for that “inside champion” to help our deal move forward. In addition to this, I believe that in building better business relationships, the road goes both ways. I try to equally be that champion for my client. Because it serves so many purposes to do so, and it is the right thing to do as it aligns to the deeper principles I believe in, which are:

To create unity in diversity, and to help people orient their work lives towards service. To engage with people, and customer-focused organizations that seek to continually learn and grow. To work in the spirit of truthfulness, teamwork, and transparency, as this is the foundation of improvement.

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Agile Management, culture, Trust at Work, Uncategorized

What Should Companies Focus on to Grow?

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By David Vicentin

Nowadays, one of the buzzwords in companies is growth. Companies want to be better today than yesterday, and tomorrow even better than today. But the challenge itself is not the need for growth rate. The challenge is related to how to achieve continuous and sustainable growth over the years in a scenario which constantly changes.

Several studies have been done analyzing the sources of growth, especially related to companies and countries. Centuries ago Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus studied the elements which can influence growth in countries. These studies provided very rich knowledge when applied to companies of different sizes and industries.

It’s interesting to see how people explain growth. If you ask a company leader “What do you need to grow?” the answer might be “New investments.” If you ask “What kind of investments?” most will answer “New equipment.” If you want to be more specific and ask a colleague what should be done to increase sales, production or profit, he may respond “Buy new technology.” “Equipment or technology” may be correct, but it represents only one component of the answer.

Growth can also be explained based on the variables of Physical Capital (K), Labour (L) and Technology (T). So the idea behind this approach is a formula as represented below in which Y represents the results for each company in terms of revenue, output or even profit.

Y = f(K, L, T)

That means that a company output is influenced by different variables and not only technologies. The interesting point about this reflection is that one answer will not solve everyone’s problem. For over 15 years, working in different industries, my team and I were able to increase companies’ results 90% of the time, with ZERO investment in new technologies. So, what’s the miracle?

The answer is People. The eyes and expertise of a Consultant or a Coach can help your company, in a short-time frame, identify opportunities to increase productivity, quality, and much more. If we take a closer look at the Labour part above, we can identify new sources of growth. For example, labour can be seen not only as how many people you have under your organization but it MUST include knowledge acquired over time. Ask yourself: how is your team expanding their knowledge and understanding of methods and techniques over time? There are different ways of learning and once you create a learning organization you’ll start to benefit from it.

And if you’ve achieved the desired results, what’s next? Sustain the results. Whether the environment changes or not, it is important to have the right people (with the right knowledge) to respond properly to those variations. Training and “learning by doing,” as Agile proposes, can be very useful strategies to achieve long-term results.

In summary, growth is possible when you have the knowledge to achieve it. Consult experts and engage people toward your purpose and you’ll see the results.

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Kanban, Scrum Master, Uncategorized

Slaying Hydra: The Story of A Business Agility Coaching Partnership

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Part I of III

Summer 2014. The IT group of “Big Data Marketing” was in the full throws of an Agile transformation spearheaded by the new CTO. I was brought in as a Scrum Coach. My initial objective was to launch a couple of Scrum teams and serve as their Scrum Master. Around the same time, the firm’s head of PMO had been re-assigned as the Agile Practices Lead (APL) and he and I began working together on supporting the new Scrum Master community of practice, populated by his new reports. Our work gradually evolved into much more than what either of us could have imagined at the time. This 3-part series is my first attempt at putting down the story of that partnership.

In addition to serving as the initial Scrum Master for some of the teams, I was also trying to help existing team members transition into the Scrum Master role. I wanted to develop internal capacity so that I could focus on supporting a growing program of multiple teams. As the number of Scrum Masters and teams I was supporting increased, so too did the need for collaboration with the APL.

At the time, senior IT leadership was focussed on getting those doing the work of creating value (the teams) to fundamentally change the way they were working. That is, into self-organizing teams with Scrum Masters as “servant-leaders”. This included the reassignment of project managers as Scrum Masters and business analysts as Product Owners and staff into cross-siloed teams.

Chaos and confusion ensued. It was a deliberate strategy of senior leadership: Disrupt the culture of complacency. Force people to transform by throwing them into chaos. Throw everyone into the deep end and the right people will learn to swim.

A great deal of pressure was placed on the Scrum Masters to measure and improve team performance (based on pseudo-metrics such as story point velocity). They were essentially told to create a new identity for themselves and this was painful. Similarly, the APL was on the hook to support all these people in their new roles – to be a “servant-leader of the servant-leaders”. This concept of servant-leadership was front and centre in the conversation: “What is it, and how do we make it work here?” My role was to help create a shared understanding of the desired new culture.

I discovered months later that the day after I started the engagement, around 50 people had been fired. This had nothing to do with me, but naturally people thought that it did. Even years later, this day was commonly referred to by the survivors as “Bloody Monday”. Because of the timing of the mass-exit, unprecedented in the company’s 25-year history, staff understandably regarded me as the consultant who advised the cull. It’s not exaggerating to say that it instilled terror, was emotionally coupled with the transformation as a whole and implicated me as an individual. I thought of myself as one contributing help, but I was regarded as one contributing to harm. I saw myself as a Hippocrates but I was known as a Procrustes. I only learned about this months later, after I had finally managed to cultivate a bond of trust with some folks. A consequence of this fear was that I found myself in many one-on-one sessions with new Scrum Masters who were struggling to adapt and afraid of being the next victim to lose their jobs. Rather than providing Scrum Master therapy, I should have been helping the company to improve its delivery capabilities.

The theme of this first stage was the deep, broad and painful disruption of people’s lives caused by this deep Satir J-curve transformation model deployed by senior management. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time is that emotionally, people experience change the same way they experience pain. The human brain literally responds the same. Not only were these human beings experiencing deep, chaotic change, they were also experiencing deep pain. And I was complicit in this.

The other contract coaches and I attempted to bring the crisis to the attention of senior management. We believed that it was a leadership problem, they believed that it was a staff complacency problem. The standoff lead to the coaches losing access to the leaders we were trying to help. This was a deep crisis for the group of coaches and the staff. The staff were beginning to see us as their advocates and we failed. For many Agile coaches, their part in the story ends here. In fact, some of the coaches on our team soon decided to move on to other opportunities. Others were not asked to extend their services beyond their initial contract term. Fortunately for me, the story didn’t end here. I will share more about this in Parts II & III of this series.

A teaser: These days, I advise and coach senior management to take responsibility to deliver services to customers, to understand what makes their services fit for the purposes of their customers and to design and evolve service delivery systems the fitness criteria of which are transparent to all those involved in the work. Then, allow people to truly self-organize around how the work gets done. In other words, manage the work not the people.

To be continued…

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Miscellaneous, Uncategorized

Selling Organizational Transformation (Part I)

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Perhaps the most difficult sales effort is the one where you need to move beyond the level you’ve fixed yourself in. The focus of this article is to look at one way to mature a relationship beyond the initial landing to where real traction occurs and where you could really sell effective transformational change in the organization. For example, you’ve landed a small deal somewhere in the junior corporate strata, say at the ‘Team’ level, and you’re now seeking to expand. The problem is you are stuck at that level and you may have pigeonholed yourself with that small deal. And now you face the real risk of losing out on larger opportunities – opportunities perhaps where you can help drive real business agility.

To further complicate matters, it is very rare that your customer will ever fully tell you exactly what is going on in an organization. And that can be for a number of reasons. And in my recent 24 years of sales efforts, the reasons are virtually endless.

However I have found there is one common tactic that works towards the successful expansion of your valued services within an organization, especially if the level you initially land on is junior.

To demonstrate, I’d like to look at what actually happens, in my experience, with the typical sales process. Personally, I love having my Senior Consultants helping medium and large enterprises achieve real business agility. It’s the difference, in my opinion, between ‘doing Agile’ and ‘being Agile’, so I have been quite keen on developing ways to drive towards this outcome.

True story (and all names are pseudonyms): I reached out to a colleague who introduced me to his friend in the IT side of a large bank. Purposefully I did not use a PowerPoint or give a presentation. Instead, we talked about his industry, his competitors, the future, and where the real change needed to happen in order to meet that future. As a salesperson, my feet are on the street, and I was able to discuss trends, customers, potential pitfalls and potential opportunities.

I was able to do this (hint) because I studied his industry – hard – before the meeting. I looked at the changes in associated industries, and the implications that might have on his industry. And the implications if his company initiates a strategy to meet those challenges, and the implications if they don’t make that effort. We discussed the impact on different generations, for example how Boomers consume services differently than Millennials do, and why.

Asking really good questions in such meetings can be difficult, if you are not prepared. So do your homework. I was able to secure a small deal at the ‘Team’ level based on the combination of what I’ve described above.

But still, even as the work started, I wasn’t getting the audience to discuss their larger organizational initiative, and that is really where I wanted to play.

In this same scenario, I found out that a new CEO had taken up the helm at this bank. Where did that CEO come from? What challenges were faced and overcome at their previous positions (aka, why did this bank hire her?). New CEO’s tend to ‘shake things up’, and given that, where do you think the first mandate will be directed? What is the lowest performing division or operations in that bank?

Look at the stock market, the Quarterly and Annual Reports. Look for clues. I found that the CEO stated that “it is a new era to find Efficiencies and Effectiveness” in a public announcement. I just discovered their organizational initiative.

Next step was to structure all meetings at that bank to sell that same message. If you’re not selling the same message, then you are not aligned to that strategy. And you will never get above that junior level you wish to move beyond. Of course, if you cannot deliver efficiencies and effectiveness, move onto a different client. But this happens to be completely aligned to what we at BERTEIG do, so it’s gold.

And use social media. What has that CEO written/published? How many followers does she have? Which symposiums has she attended or spoken at?

I found one of her Sr. Executives had traveled to the States for a conference. I found that out through Facebook. If you can suspend the ‘creep factor’, I was looking at his profile and I noticed that 50% of his friends were co-workers of a former 3-letter acronym company. And he published a photo of the road sign naming the city where the conference was held. Research showed there were 4 conferences in that city. Three were local in focus, but one was on Big Data and Analytics. LinkedIn told me that the Sr. Executive is in charge of End-User adoption (i.e. Customer focused).

It doesn’t take a leap of faith to figure out that the Sr. Executive is most likely looking at options to obtain and manage customer information in order to better support their customer, and to tailor future offerings to that customer. That’s a lot of data that has to be managed, and managed well. (I urge you to think like his customer when doing this research.)

Knowing that alone gives you something to talk about when you meet an Executive in an elevator – and you will get that opportunity.

But don’t stop there. Who spoke at the conference? Do a search. In my case I found out that the Sr. Executive who attended, had a former co-worker speaking on behalf of that 3 letter company. I downloaded his Big Data presentation. Since the two of them worked together, which is the most likely company to get invited in to do Big Data work at the bank? And if I went into a meeting with a negative view of that acronym company, how would that help my chances with the Sr. Executive, considering his friends are employed by it?

This is not a negative. You now know who your competition is. Do your research. That competition is really, really good at Executive-to-Executive pairing, but their delivery is known as being a bit ‘thin’. That’s your entry point. Don’t fight the battle on grounds you cannot possible win on.

You’ve done the bare minimum of research so far that if you were in an elevator and that new CEO was standing there, you could strike up a meaningful conversation of value, without “going over the head” of your contact. But the conversation must have meaning, bring value, be customer focused, show that you know her industry, and it must be aligned to her mandate.

I got that elevator opportunity, because I wasn’t sitting at my desk. “Sarah Jameson, I am Mark Kalyta, congratulations on your new role. I’m working with Christine Smith, your VP who is over in IT. We’re providing some consulting (don’t sell the ‘training’ for example, unless you want to pigeon hole yourself again) to help her team bring ‘efficiency and effectiveness’ to her vertical, and we are having some early measurable success”. Pause.

Note, you’ve just reiterated her mandate, you indirectly informed her that her message is reaching her VP’s, and ‘Christine Smith’ is actioning the CEO mandate by hiring you, and you are applying measurements that show your group is helping her team. In this case, I wasn’t able to insert my knowledge around their Big Data efforts, however I wasn’t worried, and I could play that card later.

So I started with a small bit of work in a junior team with no access to Christine Smith, the VP. LinkedIn research found a connection in the chain from my junior person up to the CEO, and identified Christine as my project owner, and the CEO as owning the mandate.

Back to Sarah Jameson. “Sarah, my challenge is that the work over there represents 5% of what my organization is really good at, and that is helping organizations at the Leadership level find those efficiencies and drive effectiveness (see what I parroted there?) so that your ‘customer’ sees the value and benefits from it” (and there). “We are doing great work with Christine, and early measurements show a 10% improvement in efficiency with her teams, and that is great for the overall effectiveness of your organization. I’d like to broaden that message across your Leadership team; is that something you can help me with or could delegate to me accordingly? Because I think we can duplicate this early success, if there is an appetite for it. How would you suggest I proceed?”

Now the above may seem sloppy, but there are key points that can be drawn from it. I am not going to get into all of them. You may fall flat on your face with this approach, and if so, that would be all about Sarah Jameson, and not about your skills. But you’ve hedged your bets.

Now, your next steps are clear. You need to advert the perceived “end-run”, and that requires a different strategy.

Read Part II to find out what comes next!

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Agile Management, Scrum Master, Trust at Work, Uncategorized

What if no one was forced to do Scrum?

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I just commented on a LinkedIn thread about “Sprint Zero”. It occurred to me that Sprint Zero is often used as one of many coping mechanisms for people who are forced to do Scrum. It also occurred to me that in my 9 years or so working with a reliable sample size of Scrum teams, not one of those teams was populated entirely by people who were not coerced into doing Scrum.

Gut check: The percentage of people I know who are currently on Scrum teams and who would be doing Scrum if it wasn’t mandated by management could be lower than 50%. This begs the questions: What if Scrum was offered to teams as an optional way to manage their own work? Would there be less Scrum in the world?

With one exception, all of the Scrum teams I have worked with were mandated (forced) by management to implement Scrum. The exceptional team was exceptional in other ways. They were by far the happiest and most revolutionary (in terms of recognition for business success in their organization). Although one or two hesitant team members were roped in by their peers, the social climate of the team allowed the wary to adapt safely and gradually to their new reality.

For the overwhelming majority (in my experience), there is an irony, even a paradox at play. A lot has been said & written about how command and control management is antithetical to Scrum. Yet, many—if not most—Scrum adoptions are commanded by management with vanity metrics (i.e. velocity) installed to uphold the illusion of control.

What are some of the other coping mechanisms for people who are forced to do Scrum? What is driving this behaviour? How many of these behaviours have been labelled as “anti-patterns” and why?

Safety is an essential success factor for any organization. Is it safe for people to choose to not do Scrum, or express dissent about Scrum adoption in their organization? What does this tell us about Scrum itself? Does Scrum need to be reimagined or reframed in order to make Scrum adoption safer for more people? Is it safe to do so?

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Agile Management, Kanban, Uncategorized

Kanban: Real Scaled Agility for Your Enterprise

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Your business is an ecosystem of interdependent services, a complex adaptive system.

A bunch of organizations I know started their journey of increasing their agility with Scrum. That didn’t solve all of their problems. Kanban enables organizations to evolve their service delivery systems towards mature business agility.

As addressed in How Kanban Saved Agile, pure Scrum is extremely rare. Scrumbut (the disparaging label that spawned from so many organizations reporting that they do Scrum, but…) on the other hand, is extremely common.

In order to not be Scrumbut, you need the following:
  • Cross-functional development team of 7 +/- 2 people—ALL skills needed to ship product is present on the team—there are no dependencies external to the team;
  • One source of demand with no capacity constraints—the Product Owner is the customer AND full-time member of the team;
  • Sprints are one month or less, begin with starting new demand from the Product Owner and end with the delivery of potentially shippable Product Increments, followed by a retrospective about how to do better next Sprint;
  • “Potentially Shippable” means that the decision about whether to actually ship is purely a business decision. All the technical work is done;
  • If all of the technical work required in order to ship isn’t done, then the Sprint is a failed Sprint;
  • The Scrum Master is a servant-leader and Scrum educator to the entire organization.

How many organizations do you know of with Scrum teams that meet all of the requirements above? I don’t know one.

So, what’s the solution? Give up on Scrum? Are we still getting benefits from Scrumbut? Alright, let’s stop it with the Scrumbut already. Let’s acknowledge what’s really going with real teams in the real world and call that Scrum. Let’s refer to the above  checklist as “Ideal Scrum”.

Agile scaling methods have become a popular risk hedging tactic for all the loose ends dangling around the real teams in the real world.

Here are some of the reasons for adding layers of scaling around Agile teams:

  • Teams are not fully cross-functional;
  • Teams have external and opaque depencies;
  • Many of these dependencies are shared services with multiple sources of demand and constrained capacity—often overburdened;
  • External dependencies can be other teams—demand from other teams shows up in their backlogs, prioritized by their own Product Owners;
  • Many dependencies don’t play by the same rules at all—some reside in a different part of the organization, with different structures and political forces;
  • The Product Owners are proxies for multiple stakeholders and customers and the Product Backlogs represent an array of multiple sources of demand, with different service level expectations, strategic origins, degrees of clarity, urgency and political forces pushing them into the deliver organization;
  • The Product Backlogs are made up primarily of solutions defined by stakeholders and translated by the pseudo-Product Owners as pseudo-user stories—how they get there is opaque, the “fuzzy front end”—and somewhere in here a fuzzy delivery commitment was already made;
  • The work of a Sprint includes all of the work that the non-cross-functional teams can get done—then whatever the teams get “done” is “delivered” (handed-off) to a subsequent set of teams or process steps (usually fairly well defined at an organizational level but outside of the teams’ influence);
  • Delivery decisions are made based on constraints imposed by legacy technology, systems and their gatekeepers (for historically good reasons);
  • The teams are “done” at the end of each Sprint, yet much work is still to be done before their “done” work is potentially shippable;
  • The Scrum Master’s are held collectively accountable for the collective deliverables of the teams and their ability to cross-team coordinate and integrate—accountability by committee translates into no one is actually responsible.
  • Middle managers are scrambling to pick up the pieces because they are actually accountable for delivered results.

Generally speaking, the aim of Agile scaling methods is to apply larger Agile wrappers around clusters of Agile teams in order to re-establish some kind of hierarchical structure needed to manage the interdependencies described above. Whether its a Release Train or a Nexus, or whatever else, the idea is that there is an “Agile Team of Teams” managing the interdependencies of multiple, smaller teams. As long as the total number of people doesn’t grow beyond the Dunbar number (~150), the Dunbar-sized group is dedicated and cross-functional, there is a team managing the interdependencies within the Dunbar, there are no dependencies outside of the Dunbar and there is some cadence (1-3 months) of integrated delivery—it’s still “Agile”. All of this scaling out as far as a Dunbar (and only that far) allows the enterprise to still “be Agile”—Scaled Agile.

This is all supposed to be somehow more realistic than Ideal Scrum (with perhaps am overlay of Scrum of Scrums and a Scrum of Scrum of Scrums). It’s not. How many organizations do you know of that can afford to have ~150 people 100% dedicated to a single product? Perhaps today there is enough cash lying around, but soon enough the  economic impact will be untenable, if not unsustainable.

How does Kanban address this problem? Your business is a complex adaptive system. You introduce a Kanban system into it such that it is likely that the complex adaptive system is stimulated to improve. The Systems Thinking Approach to Introducing Kanban—STATIK—is how you can make such a transition more successful (@az1):
  1. Understand the purpose of the system—explicitly identify the services you provide, to whom you provide them and why;
  2. Understand the things about the delivery of the service that people are not happy about today—both those whose needs are addressed by the service and those doing the work of delivering the service;
  3. Define the sources of demand—what your customers care about and why;
  4. Describe the capability of your system to satisfy these demands;
  5. Map the workflow of items of customer-recognizable value (@fer_cuenca), beginning with a known customer need and ending with the need being met through stages of primary knowledge discovery (Scrum teams somewhere in the middle, towards the end)—focus on activities, not looping value streams;
  6. Discover classes of service—there are patterns to how different kinds of work flow through your system (they are not arbitrarily decided by pseudo-Product Owners), what are they? Group them, they are classes of service and knowing them enables powerful risk management;
  7. With all of the above as an input, design the Kanban system for the service;
  8. Learn how to do steps 2-7 and start applying it directly to your own context in a Kanban System Design class;
  9. Socialize and rollout (learn how by participating in a Kanban Coaching Professional Masterclass);
  10. Implement feedback-loop Cadences for continuous evolution—learn the 7 Kanban Cadences and begin applying to your own context in a Kanban Management Professional class;
  11. Repeat with all of the interdependent services in your organization—every “dependency” is a service—Kanban all of them with STATIK and begin implementing the Cadences.

Don’t get hung up on teams, roles, your latest reorg, how people will
respond to another “change”, who’s in, who’s out, etc. These are all part of the service as it is now—your current capability. Initially, no changes are required at this level. The kanban system will operate at a higher level of scale. Through feedback-loop cadences, it will evolve to be fit for the purpose of your customers without a traumatic and expensive reorg.  Who is responsible for this? Identify this person. If you are the one thinking about this problem, there is a good chance that it’s you. Whoever it is, this is the manager of the service; take responsibility, do the work and make life better for everyone.

For more information about LeanKanban University Certified Kanban courses provided by Berteig, please go to www.worldmindware.com/kanban. Some spots are still available for our classes in Toronto, June 12-16.

For Agilists who have read this far and still don’t get it, start here:

14 Things Every Agilist Should Know About Kanban

The story below may be familiar to some:

Our IT group started with Scrum. Scores of people got trained. Most of our Project Managers became “Certified” Scrum Masters. Most of our Business Analysts became “Certified” Product Owners. We purged some people who we knew would never make the transition. We reorganized everyone else into cross-functional teams – mostly developers and testers. But now they are Scrum Developers. We tried to send them for “Certified” Scrum Developer training but hardly anyone of them signed up. So they are Just Scrum Developers. But we still call them developers and testers. Because that’s still how they mostly function—silos within “cross functional teams”, many tales of two cities rather than just one.

After the Scrum teams had been up and running for a while and we were able to establish some metrics to show the business how Agile we were (since they didn’t believe us based on business results), we had a really great dashboard showing us how many Scrum teams we had, how many Kanban teams, how many DevOps, how many people had been trained. We even knew the average story point velocity of each team.

The business didn’t get it. They were worried that Agile wasn’t going to solve their problem of making commitments to customers and looking bad because we still weren’t able to deliver “on time”.

As IT leadership, we were really in the hot seat. We started to talk about why the transformation wasn’t going as it should. We knew better than to bring the Agile coaches into the boardroom. They were part of the problem and needed to be kept at arms length from those of us who were making important decisions. Besides, their Zen talk about “why?” was really getting old fast. Some thought it was because we didn’t have the right technology. Others were convinced it was because we didn’t have the right people. After all, we didn’t go out and higher experienced (above-average) Scrum Masters and Product Owners, instead we just retrained our own people. Clearly that wasn’t working.

We started with improving the Scrum Masters. We went out and hired a few with impressive resumes. We developed some Scrum Master KPIs (HR jumped all over this one). Then one day we had a collective flash of brilliance—since the ScrumMasters are the servant leaders of teams, we will make them responsible for collecting and reporting team metrics and this will tell us how well the teams are doing and how they need to improve. This surely would be the key to improving the performance of IT and get us on a better footing with the business.

But we didn’t get the response we were hoping for. The ScrumMasters soon complained that the metrics of the teams were impacted by dependencies that they had no influence over. When we pushed harder and shamed them publicly for failing to produce meaningful metrics, they tried harder, but they weren’t able to do it. Some began disengage. “This is not the job I signed up for” became their new mantra. This was puzzling. We were empowering them and they were recoiling. Maybe we didn’t get the right Scrum Masters after all. Maybe we needed to go out and find people who could think and act effectively beyond the confines of their own teams. Or…

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Agile coaching, How-To Apply Agile, scrum team improvement, Uncategorized

The Soft Skills Revolution: Why You May Want Team Development

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If you go on line and type “soft skills” into your browser, you will come up with a plethora of sites. That’s because soft skills are being touted as the most important skill set for any individual in any career. Soft skills are becoming de rigeur in job applications and leadership training of every kind. One might say that there is, in fact, a soft skills revolution occurring in every sector of society.

What is motivating this revolution? Perhaps the more automated our world becomes, we see that our more human characteristics and relationships are needed to balance such a high degree of automation. Perhaps it’s become clear that human characteristics are what drive everything forward in either a positive or negative fashion.

Wikipedia describes soft skills in this way:

Soft skills are a combination of interpersonal people skills, social skills, communication skills, character traits, attitudes, career attributes, [1] social intelligence and emotional intelligence quotients among others that enable people to effectively navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills. [2]

By another definition, soft skills are those skills that are difficult to measure.

With the advent of the Agile Manifesto (www.agilemanifesto.com) and agile processes permeating business and organizational cultures more and more, people are abandoning the silo mentality and striving to create a more communal environment and team consciousness. Many organizations and businesses are learning that teams rather than individuals are more effective at accomplishing goals.

When a team of people have to work together, there is an expectation that they will all do their best to get a job done. On the other hand, it’s also normal for people on a team to encounter hiccups and even conflicts, whether it’s issues of personality, ego or disagreements of one kind or another. Then there are those team members who do not feel safe to offer their opinion, or those who harbor a prejudice against a certain type of person they may be required to work with.

By putting people together to work alongside each other day after day, we are creating a potent mix. Human beings are extremely complex and diverse after all. There are volumes written about both the need for and the difficulty of people working and achieving together.

From a recent Insight BTOES newsletter about hiring practices:

“If they’re the best there is in their craft but would prefer to just do their job and be left alone, it isn’t likely they’ll engage in team improvement activities and become a contributing part of the new culture. It’s simply not worth taking on the resistance/non-engagement that you’ll have to deal with until your patience runs out and you’re right back where you started…”

http://insights.btoes.com/hard-skills-or-soft-skills-more-important-leadership-culture-transformation

Many corporations now claim that soft skills are the number one priority when hiring, Hard skills can be easily taught but soft skills make the difference whether a person is even teachable and flexible enough for a corporate environment.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, because soft skills have not been the focus of our education systems, and those who have them need continuous practice and improvement. But everyone has the potential to become more empathetic, cooperative, supportive, and respectful.

Whether it’s learning to communicate effectively, or to create a sense of cohesion in a team, there are many pieces that can be put in place to help any team (and its individual parts) be more powerful, effectual and happy.

One very basic ingredient that can make a world of difference to a team’s work is to feel safe. Safety comes with having clear and consistent goals. Team members feel safe to speak his or her mind without fear or judgement, even if their opinion is different from others. A team feels safe to experiment and to succeed or fail. Safety is built on the very essential idea of trust.

Psychologist, author and consultant Harvey Robbins has written extensively about the idea of trust as a key element of any team. He describes trust as follows:

· Trust means setting clear, consistent goals. If people don’t know exactly what they’re supposed to, they will feel set up to fail…

· Trust means being open, fair, and willing to listen. This requires more than making a thoughtful, considerate face. It means listening to the words other people are saying.

· Trust means being decisive… It’s a challenging thing to say, but sometimes it’s better to make any decision – good, bad, or indifferent – than it is to make no decision at all.

· Trust means supporting one another…Your team belong to you, and you belong to them.

· Trust means sharing credit with team members. You are there for them, not vice versa. If you are a glory hog, you are stealing from the team.

· Trust means being sensitive to team members’ needs. You should know what legitimate secondary agendas they may have, and be willing to help them achieve their personal goals.

· Trust means respecting the opinions of others. The worst thing a leader can do is denigrate or dismiss or ignore team members. If they’re no good, move them off the team. But even then you owe them your respect.

· Trust means empowering team members to act. It means trusting that they are up to the challenges that you trained them for…

· Finally, and ultimately, and most difficultly, trust means being willing to suffer… The ordinary leader exposes his people to all the risk. The trusted leader assumes risk himself.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/716760

When a team has clearly articulated goals, it helps build a sense of cohesion, in that every member is aware of what they are working toward. When team members are allowed to work out an action plan toward achieving a goal, this gives everyone a stronger sense of purpose and ownership.

If you’re wondering whether a Team Development workshop would be of benefit to, or is necessary for your business or organization, here are some thoughts from MindTools that can help you decide:

  • Are there conflicts between certain people that are creating divisions within the team?
  • Do team members need to get to know one another?
  • Do some members focus on their own success, and harm the group as a result?
  • Does poor communication slow the group’s progress?
  • Do people need to learn how to work together, instead of individually?
  • Are some members resistant to change, and does this affect the group’s ability to move forward?
  • Do members of the group need a boost to their morale?”

https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newTMM_52.htm

Everyone has the potential to grow their soft skills. However, a company may not have the resources to help unlock this potential in its employees.

If team development is not part of a company’s culture there may be discomfort in dealing with friction arising from a lack of soft skills. In this case, an external facilitator or coach can be a very helpful resource to guide a work team, using thought-provoking activities and role-playing, to find greater connection and trust amongst themselves, and to address issues with a detached point of view.

Organizing such a workshop for your team does not mean they are not doing well or failing. It means you, the team lead/ manager/ CEO/ HR person, etc, care about your team’s best interests, highest achievements and happiness.

Valerie Senyk is a facilitator for Team Development with BERTEIG, and can be contacted by going to http://www.worldmindware.com/AgileTeamDevelopment

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Review of: Product Mastery – From Good to Great Product Ownership

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Note: This review is based on an incomplete pdf copy of Product Mastery that was shared with the reviewer, which therefore limits discussion of the book.

Geoff Watts, author of Scrum Mastery, has now released Product Mastery: From Good to Great Product Ownership, published by Inspect & Adapt Ltd. The book contains two Forewards by Jeff Sutherland and Roman Pichler, both masters in the field of Scrum management.

The prose Watts uses is straightforward and provides an easy and intelligent read even for the layman, with graphs and illustrations that illuminate his ideas.

The book is built around the idea of DRIVEN, an acronym Watts uses to discuss the traits and characteristics of a great product owner. The book uses each letter as headings, i.e. D = Decisive, R = Ruthless, I = Informed, V = Versatile, E = Empowering, and N = Negotiable. Each heading offers pragmatic advice into the many responsibilities of being a product owner. I will give a few snippets of some insights that Watts shares.

In the first section, entitled “Decisive,” Watts creates stories and discussion that show how product owners need to have courage and trust themselves and others to make decisions, often with incomplete information. He gives strategies to make the decision-making process easier, such as reducing the number of options a product master is considering, and prioritizing. He cites Edison as once famously saying, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Under “Ruthless” Watts shares a mantra used by product owners: “If the product is going to fail, then I would rather it fail in month 2 than month 22.” In other words, it is better to develop the wrong thing quickly and get feedback, than wait too long in an effort to make sure no mistakes are ever made.

The third section is called “Informed.” Watts includes a quote by Roman Pichler, author of Agile Product Management with Scrum, who told him: “Customer feedback is the basis for ideas. Customer data is the basis for decisions.” Watts then cites the experience of a company that creates mobile games. Rather than ask for ratings or feedback, the company monitors actual usage of their games.

In “Versatile” Watts advises product owners to “remain flexibly firm.”

Under the last heading, “Negotiable,” he outlines games to play when negotiating attributes of a product. In this section Watts makes it clear that product owners need to be careful to not fall into the trap of being a perfectionist. He writes: “The temptation to just add a little extra here or there is very strong; but those little bits here or there quickly add up and can easily lead to significant delays, not to mention an unnecessarily cumbersome product to support.”

Product Mastery is a book that is sure to attract a wide readership as it provides a balance

between vision, direction and execution. Wisely, Watts is not dogmatic in his style. He gives numerous approaches to the items under a product owner’s watch. He writes: “Great product owners know how to find the right middle ground, one with an appropriate balance of data and intuition – and a good measure of courage.”

I personally will be adding Product Mastery to BERTEIG’s book offerings for our Certified Scrum Product Owner attendees.

Product Mastery: From Good to Great Product Ownership (282 pp)

Table of Contents:

Foreward – Jeff Sutherland

Foreword by Roman Pichler

DECISIVE 26

RUTHLESS 64

INFORMED 102

VERSATILE 144

EMPOWERING 180

NEGOTIABLE 222

Be DRIVEN to Be Great 264

Available at https://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=product+mastery

Product Mastery: From Good to Great Product Ownership Mar 1 2017

by Geoff Watts and Jeff Sutherland

Kindle EditionCDN$ 41.94

PaperbackCDN$ 42.18

 

 

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Uncategorized

Using “Status” in Agile Coaching & Training

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Recently after attending a Scrum Alliance webinar on “Best Practices in Coaching,” I was reminded of my experiences teaching Acting students at university, and how I used changing status to help them achieve their best.

Status refers to the position or rank of someone within a particular group or community. I believe it was Canadian Keith Johnstone who introduced the idea of “playing status” to theatre improv teams. It is used to create relationships between characters onstage, and to change those relationships to move a story forward.

Status can be indicated through position, posture, facial expression, voice and clothing. It is a fascinating tool for any trainer or coach to use.

At the beginning of a semester with new students, I would invite them to sit on the stage floor in a circle with me. I would welcome them, discuss my expectations of their learning, and tell them what they could expect from me. We’d go over the course syllabus and I’d answer questions. I purposefully put myself in an equal status to them, as a way of earning their trust, because the processes of acting* requires huge amounts of trust. I also wanted to establish a degree of respect in them for the stage by all of us being in a “humble” position on the stage floor.

However, when I would introduce a new exercise to them that required them to go beyond their comfort zones, I would deliver instructions from a standing position while they were seated. By elevating my status, I conveyed the importance of the exercise, and it was a signal that it was not something they could opt out of. In this way, I could help them to exercise their creativity to a greater extent.

Another way I encouraged my students to take risks was to take risks myself. Sometimes I would illustrate an acting exercise by doing it myself first. For those few minutes I became a colleague with my students, one of them, equal in status. If I could “make a fool of myself” (which is how it may look to an outsider), then they could too.

I had one student who had great potential, but who took on the role of class clown and would not give it up. He fought against going deeper and getting real. One day in an exercise where they had to “own” a line of dialogue, I had him in a chair onstage, while I and the rest of the students were seated. He had to repeat the line of text until it resonated with him and became real. After some minutes, nothing was changing in him. In desperation had him turn his chair around so his back was to us. I then indicated to the other students to quietly leave the room. He could hear something happening but was confused about it. He was not able to turn around and look.

When I allowed him to turn around it was only him and me left in the theatre. I had him go through the repetition exercise again. Without an audience, and with me still seated, he finally broke through the wall he had erected and connected with the line of text from his inner self. It was a wonderful moment of truth and vulnerability. I then allowed the other students back in, and had him find that connection again with the students there. He was able to do it.

He is grateful to me to this day for helping him get beyond his comfortable role as clown to become a serious actor.

When training or coaching, it seems to me there can be huge value in playing with status. Sometimes taking a lower status, an equal status, or a higher status, can move a team or upper management into discovering whatever may have been blocking the process. Again, there are many ways to indicate status and even a status change to effect progress.

In his book, “Improv-ing Agile Teams,” Paul Goddard makes some important observations about using status. He writes: “Even though status is far less obvious than what is portrayed on stage, individuals still can take small steps to encourage status changes within their own team. For example, asking a team member who exhibits lower status behaviours to take ownership of a meeting or oversee a process not only boosts that person’s confidence but also increases status among peers…these subtle actions can help make lower-status team members feel more comfortable when expressing new ideas or exposing hidden problems.”

A colleague reminded me of a 1975 publication called “Power: How to Get It, How to Use It,” in which author Michael Korda gives advice about facial expression, stance, clothing and innumerable ways to express “power.” The idea of using status in the context I’m writing about is not about gaining power, but about finding ways through one’s own status changes to help unlock the capacity and potential of others.

How can a coach use status to help someone in management who is blocking change? Is someone on a team not accepting what others have to offer because s/he is keeping his/her status high? Is a Scrum Master necessarily a high-status team member, or rather a servant to the team (low status)?

I am curious if any coaches or trainers out there have used status in a way that created growth and change.

*Good acting is a matter of the actor finding the truth in oneself as it relates to the character he or she is playing. It requires vulnerability and courage to step out of one’s known persona and take on another as truthfully as possible. Inherent truthfulness also applies to work in any other endeavour.

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Dejirafication: Free Your Process

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Alexey Krivitsky recently posted a presentation on his blog, agiletrainings.eu, addressing the issue of so-called-agile tools, specifically Jira.

Here is a link to his presentation.

The movie images he chose gave me a chuckle and his points really hit home.

He offers 4 points to what he calls a “Jira Rehab Program” and I found the points interesting.

Take a look. See what you think.

Share your comments on your experience with agile tools here.

Have you had success with Jira or would you rather see it disposed of?

And check out Mishkin’s recent article on the ideal electronic Agile tool.

 

 

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Link: Strong Teams Start With Trust

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One of the positive outcomes of an agile team succeeding in its transformation is the establishment of a high-functioning team.

A high-functioning team works more effectively, efficiently and can innovate more appropriately for the corporate advantage of the business.

Ryan Yeoman has a lot to say on the topic. Although he doesn’t mention agile specifically, he’s right on in his approach.

In his article, “Strong Teams Start With Trust: 5 Ways To Build Trust in Your Teams,” he writes that:

All of them point to trust as a critical and fundamental piece to success – in business and in life.

Piggy-backing all these thoughts and making it personal to myself, trust enables me to be more.  It enables me to:

  • Accomplish more and do better work by getting feedback and synergizing
  • Grow and learn more by allowing myself to be “open” and receive information
  • Teach more and serve by letting me focus my attention on others
  • Care more and empathize because I’m not constantly worried about protecting myself
  • Be more human

Trust helps you accept deepening relationships and removes politics and silos from the work place, creating an organization within which people feel safe. At its simplest, trust is a catalyst for your organization to be more: more nimble, more efficient, more effective.  It’s like oxygen for a successful team – one simply can’t exist without it.

I found his comments insightful and his links appropriate.

This is an excellent article for those team members who are striving for excellence and learning to trust one another, and themselves, in the process.

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2023
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Advanced Certified Scrum Product Owner® (ACSPO)
Online
C$1525.75
May 3
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Real Agility™ Ask Me Anything / Coaching
Online
C$750.00
May 5
2023
Details
Kanban Systems Improvement® (KMPII)
Online
C$1610.75
May 10
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Team Performance Coaching with BERTEIG (COACHING-TPC)
Online
C$750.00
May 12
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Real Agility™ Ask Me Anything / Coaching
Online
C$750.00
May 12
2023
Details
Team Kanban Practitioner® (TKP)
Online
C$1100.75
May 16
2023
Details
Kanban for Scrum Masters (ML-KSM)
Online
C$495.00
May 16
2023
Details
Kanban for Product Owners (ML-KPO)
Online
C$495.00
May 17
2023
Details
Product Owner Bootcamp with CSPO® (Certified Scrum Product Owner®) [Virtual Learning] (POBC)
Online
C$1610.75
May 17
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Team Performance Coaching with BERTEIG (COACHING-TPC)
Online
C$750.00
May 19
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Real Agility™ Ask Me Anything / Coaching
Online
C$750.00
May 19
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Team Performance Coaching with BERTEIG (COACHING-TPC)
Online
C$750.00
May 26
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Real Agility™ Ask Me Anything / Coaching
Online
C$750.00
May 26
2023
Details
Scrum Master Bootcamp with CSM® (Certified Scrum Master®) [Virtual Learning] (SMBC)
Online
C$1610.75
Jun 7
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Team Performance Coaching with BERTEIG (COACHING-TPC)
Online
C$750.00
Jun 9
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Real Agility™ Ask Me Anything / Coaching
Online
C$750.00
Jun 9
2023
Details
Kanban System Design® (KMPI)
Online
C$1610.75
Jun 13
2023
Details
Product Owner Bootcamp with CSPO® (Certified Scrum Product Owner®) [Virtual Learning] (POBC)
Online
C$1610.75
Jun 14
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Team Performance Coaching with BERTEIG (COACHING-TPC)
Online
C$750.00
Jun 16
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Real Agility™ Ask Me Anything / Coaching
Online
C$750.00
Jun 16
2023
Details
Kanban for Scrum Masters (ML-KSM)
Online
C$495.00
Jun 20
2023
Details
Kanban for Product Owners (ML-KPO)
Online
C$495.00
Jun 21
2023
Details
Team Kanban Practitioner® (TKP)
Online
C$1015.75
Jun 21
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Team Performance Coaching with BERTEIG (COACHING-TPC)
Online
C$750.00
Jun 23
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Real Agility™ Ask Me Anything / Coaching
Online
C$750.00
Jun 23
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Team Performance Coaching with BERTEIG (COACHING-TPC)
Online
C$750.00
Jun 30
2023
Details
Real Agility™ Real Agility™ Ask Me Anything / Coaching
Online
C$750.00
Jun 30
2023
Details
Scrum Master Bootcamp with CSM® (Certified Scrum Master®) [Virtual Learning] (SMBC)
Online
C$1610.75
Jul 5
2023
Details
Kanban Systems Improvement® (KMPII)
Online
C$1610.75
Jul 11
2023
Details
Product Owner Bootcamp with CSPO® (Certified Scrum Product Owner®) [Virtual Learning] (POBC)
Online
C$1610.75
Jul 12
2023
Details
Team Kanban Practitioner® (TKP)
Online
C$1015.75
Jul 19
2023
Details
Team Kanban Practitioner® (TKP)
Online
C$1015.75
Aug 15
2023
Details