My Guide to Strategic Planning Sessions With the fall here, I’ve been very busy running strategic planning sessions over the past couple of months. The start of the school year is the perfect time to bring everyone back together after summer and get aligned on the goals and projects we need to tackle over the…
When we hear the word ‘Governance’ it rarely causes excitement or passionate debates — it is typically a dry and pedantic topic for the stuffy halls of large institutional buildings. However, good governance design can make whole organizations and systems work smoothly, when the decision making accountabilities are clearly understood, and information flows along the…
Implementing agility at the portfolio level can seem daunting. However, many of the agile practices developed for the team level can be scaled up to the portfolio level. For example: For an agile delivery team, the units of work are the backlog items. These items are managed in a prioritized product backlog. Each sprint, the…
The Agile Open Canada (un)conference wrapped up in May at the University of Victoria and it was a great event. A sold-out affair with participants from across Western Canada – and even a few from Back East and the USA. The two-day event rotates between Victoria, Vancouver and Banff and uses Open Space Technology to…
How is it that with all the technological advances in the last couple of decades—with massive increases in processing power and tools to boot—individuals, teams and organizations continue to be overwhelmed? In our current reality, one of the many casualties is reflection and the opportunity to step back, think, and move with intent. We often…
Connection – a powerful feeling that has been shown to increase productivity up to 25% within a team. In February, Alluvial facilitated an 80-person divisional day for a sector within the Provincial Government, where the central theme was connection. The day was not just about fostering a deeper understanding of the work they were engaged…
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…
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…
External insights into how your teams and organization can move towards a more outcome driven approach in their product delivery can be impactful. Often, when everyone is busy dealing with the tyranny of the urgent, it can be a struggle to step back and look with clear eyes as to what is really going on…
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…
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…
“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…