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  • Dealing with Psychopaths and Narcissists during Agile Change

    Psychopathic or narcissistic toxic employees can slow down the adoption of change in a company. Many of the techniques or practices you use with healthy people do not work well with psychopaths or narcissists. This article explores four key areas that can help a change consultant succeed when dealing with toxic people.

  • Overcoming Software Impediments Using Obstacle Boards

    Life is full of obstacles; there’s bound to be a few blockers along the way. In this article, Carly Richmond ponders the successes and challenges of adopting their first Obstacle Board. She will discuss how they integrated the board into their practice, and provide some useful tips on how you can apply the lessons they learned to your own implementation.

  • Q&A on the Book Good Guys

    In the book Good Guys, David Smith and Brad Johnson describe how men can support women in the workplace by becoming their allies. It explains why men are the missing ingredient for creating gender equity in the workplace and provides solutions to increase inclusion and diversity.

  • Q&A on the Book Untapped Agility

    The book Untapped Agility by Jesse Fewell explains what holds organizations back in increasing their agility. It describes barriers that may appear during an agile transformation and provides “rebound” moves for unblocking the transformation and moving forward. This recurring pattern of Boost, then Barrier, then Rebound both encourages and enables frustrated agile champions.

  • Q&A on the Book Becoming an Effective Software Engineering Manager

    The book Becoming an Effective Software Engineering Manager by James Stanier explores how to manage engineers and what managers can do to build and run effective teams. It helps people decide if they want to go from an engineering to a manager role and organize and improve their management activities.

  • The Value and Purpose of a Test Coach

    Introducing business-oriented automated testing can involve a huge cultural change. For this we really need a Test Coach role, just like we have agile coaches and scrum masters. In this article we hear from someone living this new role, using Domain Oriented Testing on a daily basis to ensure acceptance tests have full story coverage, and unit tests verify business behavior, not implementation.

  • Engaging and Being Engaged as a Professional Coach – Candid Advice for Coaches & Clients

    As a coach, what do you need to know to have more success, getting your foot in the door of a client company? What obstacles will you have to overcome? As a company, what do you need to know about a coaching profession, not to brush off an experienced and qualified coach, while opening flood gates for charlatans, cheer-leaders, and 'best-practices" experts - and by doing so, hurting yourself

  • Leading through Experimentation in a Distributed Agile Organization

    Change is our work as agile coaches and leaders. When your teams and organizations are distributed, experimentation becomes the primary tool to aid our change navigation. As online collaboration technologies improve and we begin to understand how flexibility and choice become critical in distributed work, modeling and teaching experimentation are important for agile coaches and all leaders.

  • Q&A on the Book Agile Leadership Toolkit

    Agile leadership is the art and craft of creating the right environment for self-managing teams. The book Agile Leadership Toolkit by Peter Koning is a practical book that supports existing agile managers and leaders in growing their agile teams and creating the right environment for them.

  • Liberating Structures - an Antidote to Zombie Scrum

    Although many organizations use Scrum, the majority struggle to grasp both the purpose of Scrum as well as its benefits. They do Zombie Scrum; it looks like Scrum from a distance, but you see that things are amiss when moving closer. This article describes what Zombie Scrum is about and gives you tangible examples of how to recognize, treat and prevent Zombie Scrum by using Liberating Structures.

  • Agile Coaching Around Conflict Management

    Conflicts are not bad, it is the way we handle them that makes a difference. In a healthy team environment conflict can be a catalyst for creativity and innovation . A coach is not responsible for resolving conflict, the help the team keep conflict healthy and provide guidance and tools which enable positive outcomes

  • Q&A on the Book Level up Agile with Toyota Kata

    In the book Level Up Agile With Toyota Kata, Jesper Boeg explores how to apply Toyota Kata to drive improvement in organizations that are using or striving to use agile ways of working. He shares his experience from combining agile with Toyota Kata to enable organizations to keep improving towards their goals.

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