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Culture & Methods

Reawakening Agile with OKRs?

Corporate agile often represents an improvement over what went before but falls short on delivering the high performance management wants and quality engineering environment developers dream of. The backlog becomes tyranny. Could OKRs - objectives and key results - reawaken the radical side of agile? Or do OKRs represent a return to command and control?

Allan Kelly
on Jun 10, 2021
Culture & Methods

‘Debt’ as a Guide on the Agile Journey: Organizational Debt

In this article in a series on how ‘debt’ can be used to guide an agile journey, we will provide two examples of smells that are related to organizational debt, explain the symptoms, the impact on the business and in our organization, outline the experiments (countermeasures) that we have introduced in an effort to try to remove the smell, and provide some specific advice for you to be inspired.

Anne Abell Carsten Ruseng Jakobsen Rasmus Lund-Jensen
on May 26, 2021
Culture & Methods

Surviving Zombie Scrum

The book Zombie Scrum Survival Guide by Christiaan Verwijs, Johannes Schartau, and Barry Overeem aims to support teams that are stuck in Zombie Scrum. It helps them to understand why things are the way they are and provide them with experiments to get out of this state of Zombie Scrum by enabling collaboration with stakeholders, working increments, autonomy for teams, and continuous improvement.

Ben Linders Christiaan Verwijs Johannes Schartau Barry Overeem
on Mar 15, 2021
Architecture & Design

Software Systems Need Skin in the Game

Consequential decisions need to be taken by the people who pay for the consequences, by the people with skin in the game, and modern software practices need to reinforce this idea. On-call engineering is the quintessential modern engineering practice to create skin in the software development game.

John Rauser
on Feb 19, 2021
Culture & Methods

Who is on the Team?

Ahmad Fahmy and Cesario Ramos take the changes to the new Scrum Guide as an opportunity to explore what it means to be "on a team." They draw on research to create an ACID test to differentiate who is on the team and who isn't. They discuss different mental models around the idea of a team with the hopes that you take this opportunity to discuss and elevate the roles within your organization.

Cesario Ramos Ahmad Fahmy
on Feb 12, 2021
Culture & Methods

Improving Organizational Agility with Self-Management

This article presents "self-management" as a possibility to natively support agility to plant seeds and let both institutions and people thrive and benefit from it. Agility may go hand-in-hand with self-management as a way to shift mindsets and open a conversation to really find new ways of working in organizations.

Massimo Lavelli Pietro Antolini
on Feb 10, 2021
Culture & Methods

Key Sprint Metrics to Increase Team Dependability

What are the questions you should be asking and what behaviours should you be measuring within your Scrum teams in order to improve overall dependability and delivery efficiency? We explore how you can transform your Sprints into the building blocks for success and ensure you can continue to meet (and even surpass) long-term user and business expectations.

Will Lytle
on Dec 30, 2020
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Retrospectives Antipatterns

Using the familiar “patterns” approach, the book Retrospectives Antipatterns by Aino Vonge Corry describes unfortunate situations that can sometimes happen in retrospectives. For each situation, described as an antipattern, it also provides solutions for dealing with the situation; this can be a way to solve the problem directly or avoid similar problems in future retrospectives.

Ben Linders Aino Vonge Corry
on Dec 25, 2020
Culture & Methods

Changes in the 2020 Scrum Guide: Q&A with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland

The Scrum Guide has been updated to make it less prescriptive, using simpler language to address a wider audience. These changes have been done to make Scrum a “lightweight framework that helps people, teams and organizations generate value through adaptive solutions for complex problems”. An interview with Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland about the changes to the guide.

Ben Linders Ken Schwaber Jeff Sutherland
on Dec 24, 2020
Culture & Methods

The Complexity of Product Management and Product Ownership

Doug Talbot discusses the confusion surrounding Product Ownership / Product Management. He provides some advice on tackling the complexity of creating your own contextualised and personalised product value stream for your organisation or team and using systems thinking and Cynefin for complexity.

Douglas Talbot
on Dec 04, 2020
Culture & Methods

Applying Languages of Appreciation in Agile Teams

Respect is one of the core values of Scrum. This can be shown in many ways, including appreciation for our team members. This article introduces the concept from Gary Chapman’s book, The 5 Love Languages, and considers how this applies to our working relationships, how we identify the needs of our colleagues to feel supported and appreciated, and how this can be applied to appreciation in teams.

Christine Thompson
on Nov 12, 2020
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book Dynamic Reteaming (2-ed)

In the 2nd edition of her book Dyanamic Reteaming, Heidi Helfand shows that having stable teams is generally unrealistic and that there are ways to effectively reform teams to achieve great outcomes. She explores different approaches to team formation and reformation and provides practical advice on how to create environments where team formation can adapt and evolve effectively.

Heidi Helfand Shane Hastie
on Aug 22, 2020