The traverse to portfolio agility

The traverse to portfolio agility

In our work as coaches, we help organizations become agile. An agile organization can respond more thoughtfully—and sometimes more quickly, but not always—to changes in internal and external environments. Becoming agile means more than having your teams follow Scrum or Kanban practices. It means building the principles of transparency, inspection, and adaptation into your enterprise…

Agile Doesn’t Work Without Psychological Safety

The ideas behind Psychological Safety, particularly in an organizational change context, continue to rise in importance. Any change requires a level of vulnerability and openness to doing something in a new way. A way that individuals may not find comfortable or natural. To support individuals, teams and organizations through any transition — including an Agile…

Agile Portofolio Management

Agile Portfolio & Value Management As more and more Agile Delivery teams are taking hold in organizations, we very quickly run into challenges coordinating across teams – be it around scope, dependencies, staffing or funding. A form of adaptive governance is required for which Agile Portfolio & Value Management is well suite. It’s an methodology-agnostic…

The Shadow Backlog

Making covert backlogs visible to reduce team drag A number of years ago during a large format Inception Workshop, the group was mapping out all the different elements of the Product Development on a giant wall. The goal, quite clearly, was to make all the work visible so it could be discussed, explored, prioritized and…

Deepening Your Facilitation Skills

“The facilitator’s main task is to help the group increase effectiveness by improving its process and structure.” Roger Schwarz, The Skilled Facilitator In an age of knowledge work, the role of facilitation — both hard and soft skill sets — is the elixir, the glue, the grease, needed to get diverse craftspeople to collaborate and make magic…

Guiding an Agile Change Platform

A sustainable approach for incremental & iterative change In an age when “the pace of change is hypersonic, not glacial”, how do individuals, teams and organizations find a mechanism that’s at once supportive and enabling in such an environment? The days of linear change programs that simply roll out to cohorts like an unfurling rug…

Summer Agile Reading List

As our busy world slows down ever so slightly over the summer months, it can be a great time to kick back with a book and try to learn something new in a relaxed state of mind. Here are some of our Agile related favourites to check out: From PMO to VMO: Managing for Value…

Increasing Virtual Team Engagement with High Impact Visual

After two years of working in largely virtual environments, keeping your audience — be it team members, clients, supervisors, or anyone else you work with virtually, has become a significant challenge. And while the pandemic may be waning, working virtually is here to stay. Kristi Meredith ran a talk at the recent Global Scrum Gathering – a…

Agile in HBR

As the Agile community passes into its 3rd decade as a community, one of the major sign posts for its progression into the mainstream management world is its continued and regular presence in that stalwart of a management publication, the Harvard Business Review. Back in the early days of the Agile community, it seemed impossible…