Agile methods aren’t just for software anymore. Actually, they haven’t been just for software for quite a while now. That said, the types of companies, and the types of industries, that are exploring team-based, collaborative, iterative, and incremental approaches to do their work is rather breathtaking. Agile is truly going mainstream. The question at hand is can we apply team-based Agile straight out of the box in a non-software context? Can we take our scaled Agile approaches and apply them without modification? Mike Cottmeyer’s experience is that most of the principles and patterns apply, but sometimes the practices and…

I’ve noticed a tendency for people to dismiss an idea immediately when it isn’t apparent to them how the “ideal” or “maximum” end state can be achieved easily, quickly, and cheaply. What’s wrong with moving toward improvement, rather than giving up on an idea completely when the initial steps seem challenging? I suspect most people would agree with that in theory, although relatively few people put it into practice when improvements to the status quo are suggested. To illustrate the process, let’s take a relatively outlandish proposal and reason through it. A Trend A current trend in the IT industry…

 Leading a large-scale agile transformation isn’t about adopting a new set of attitudes, processes, and behaviors at the team level… it’s about helping your company deliver faster to market, and developing the ability to respond to a rapidly changing competitive landscape. First and foremost, it’s about achieving business agility. Business agility comes from people having clarity of purpose, a willingness to be held accountable, and the ability to achieve measurable outcomes. Unfortunately, almost everything in modern organizations gets in the way of teams acting with any sort of autonomy. In most companies, achieving business agility requires significant organizational change.…

  Leading a large-scale agile transformation isn’t about adopting a new set of attitudes, processes, and behaviors at the team level… it’s about helping your company deliver faster to market, and developing the ability to respond to a rapidly changing competitive landscape. First and foremost, it’s about achieving business agility. Business agility comes from people having clarity of purpose, a willingness to be held accountable, and the ability to achieve measurable outcomes. Unfortunately, almost everything in modern organizations gets in the way of teams acting with any sort of autonomy. In most companies, achieving business agility requires significant organizational…

We all make hundreds of decisions every day. Most of them are small, some of them are big. Many of us try very hard to focus on the most important things, so we’ll make good decisions. But what if focusing on important things isn’t the best way to perceive what is important? There’s evidence that ignoring unimportant things is a more effective way to see the important ones. According to a study at Johns Hopkins University the art of ignoring things is a learnable skill. The researchers found that people can train their brains to selectively ignore competing stimuli. With…