This is part 1 of 2. Part 2 will help self-organizing teams work with micromanagers. Well, it’ll try. Those “Agile” people are always telling managers how they should run things, as if they knew better. Allow people to form self-organizing teams, let them take ownership of their work, give them a prioritized list of objectives and the resources they need to get the work done, and get out of their way. Then the magic will happen. That advice can be pretty counter-intuitive for a traditionally-minded manager. I wonder if the problem is the way those “Agile” people talk. They describe everything…

When organizations move to agile for software delivery, there is often tension with traditional portfolio management. This talk illustrates how an organization can move from traditional portfolio management approaches to one that embraces agile software delivery. Doing so enables organizations to become predictable, improve the flow of value delivered, and pivot more quickly if necessary. We will demonstrate the use of governance that allows a more adaptive portfolio management approach.

Recently, a client asked me what an ideal feature-estimation-week would look like. It was a fairly straightforward question, but I knew she was setting a trap.  We had been training on and using ideal weeks for six months already, so this caught me off guard. It took me a little bit to wrap my head around the idea of an “ideal week” and to figure out why she was even asking You see, it wasn’t just a random question. The client was wondering if she should take into account how many team members would be working on the feature.  She…

People who want to join LeadingAgile in a technical consulting role help us gain a sense of how they approach common problems by working through one or more hands-on exercises. Just as a picture is worth a thousand words, a demonstration is worth a thousand interview questions. Somehow, a lot of candidates seem to miss the point of the hands-on exercises. We’ve examined the instructions carefully to see if we forgot to mention something important, and we don’t see what’s missing. Of course, anything can be improved, and feedback is always welcome. Yet, around nine out of every ten candidates…

It’s no secret that Agile is becoming more and more mainstream. Some might even say that it’s crossed the chasm and is considered to be the preferred method of software development. As a viable option for organizing work outside of the IT world, the industry is seeing new applications for Agile every day in a multitude of industries such as supply chain management, retail, and even fast food. So, as Agile has become more prevalent, people from traditional project management backgrounds have  jumped ship en masse to make the journey to become Agile. Some are seeking to make a complete…