People don't resist change, they resist being changed. Awareness enables individual, organisational, and social transformation.
Scrum is currently the most popular product development framework. It's also the framework I used the most and I am most comfortable using. It's a simple framework, but not easy to implement. I am going to write a Scrum series, where each post will tackle a part of Scrum, with information on its purpose and definition,... Continue Reading →
The team is at the core of agile practices and frameworks: "team of experts", "development team", "product team", "squad", etc. Software development requires the work of a team, as individual work can only get you so far. But is that assumption correct? To answer this question, I looked into organisational psychology and group dynamics research. The... Continue Reading →
Self-managed or self-organised teams is the premise for any Agile framework or organisation. But what does that mean? The meaning varies from organisation to organisation, and from person to person, but there is a standard definition for it. Let's look into it! Late J. Richard Hackman, Harvard psychology professor and one of the leading experts... Continue Reading →
I've written about The Agile Manifesto here (values) and here (principles), with this post I will dig even more in how Agile came to be. The first notable thing to mention is that Agile didn't start with... well Agile. Many of the frameworks that sit under the Agile umbrella are more than two decades old,... Continue Reading →
After diving into the Agile Manifesto and discussing the Agile Values here, this post is entirely dedicated to the accompanying principles. Originally, the 12 principles of Agile software development were split in three categories: customer, managers, teams (see below a copy of the original manifesto), each category having four principles. I. Slanted towards Customers: The... Continue Reading →
"We must be Agile!" From C-level to any level employee, Agile is becoming more and more popular. But what do they mean by being Agile? This is what I got from asking the people around me: we have to move fast I want to see the work before it's completed I need the team to... Continue Reading →
I've been looking into how the traditional hierarchical, "command and control" management came to be and also at what motivates individuals and high-performance teams with the purpose to discuss the role of the manager in an Agile environment. Most of the Agile frameworks don't tackle this topic, which creates quite a few issues when implementation time... Continue Reading →
Try to google "what motivates employees", and you can spend the rest of your days figuring this mystery out, browsing through thousands of results. A short but comprehensive summary is found on Science Direct. You get the overview and information on what you read on next, if you want to go deeper into the subject. In... Continue Reading →
"Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers - a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars - and on up through university. On the job, people, teams, and... Continue Reading →
Last year in November I attended the LeSS training with Bas Vodde in Singapore. After three days of immersion in LeSS and Lean I asked Bas: "Would you hire a Scrum Master who is not a software developer?" Bas: "No." The answer was expected. At the same time, earlier in the course, we discussed engineering... Continue Reading →
Agents of Awareness 