”Two is better than one”—Nathalie’s mistake
What do we do when one team is not sufficient to execute a large-scale project? Nathalie explains the mistake she made in the context of a complex project. Nathalie helps and tools up Agile teams who work on large-scale projects. You can also read an experience she had in her following blog post: Agility …
“Thinking I understood everything”—Simon’s mistake
Listening is one of the most important quality of a Scrum Master or Agile coach. At the beginning, Simon thought he understood everything and he tells us about his mistake in Agility. He is now coaching Agile teams. He developed a passion for all aspects of collaboration as well as team and team …
“Acting as a project manager rather than a Scrum Master”—Guillaume’s mistake
Before becoming an Agile expert able to help organizations with their Agile transition, Guillaume was a practitioner. It is important, as a Scrum Master, to support the team and help them self-organize. He is telling us his story as well as how he went from project manager to Scrum Master. Guillaume is …
Why the rush? Interview with Steffan Surdek, co-creative leadership consultant
Steffan Surdek is one of our key contributors on agileknowhow.com. He often talks about leadership and, for the first edition of our magazine, we took some time to sit down with him and talk about what he sees as leadership challenges in his coaching work with organizations. Agile Know-how: Hello Steffan, can you …
Black Gold and Agility
Scrum proposes an empirical approach to software development and invites us to focus first on delivered value instead of delivered quantity. Despite that, we notice that even after several years of practice, few teams succeed in actually applying this empirical approach. They stay well anchored in linear thinking that guides …
5 personal challenges when building Agile organizations
This article was initialy published on jesusmendez.ca #5. Be the coach and fight back old habits My ego feels great when I am invited to join crucial conversations at every level (strategic, tactic or operational), given my privileged position when starting continuous improvement transformations. The thing is, it doesn’t matter how …
Being Agile beyond Scrum
Like many of us, I started my Agile journey by looking at the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. With my team, we decided we’d try our hands at Scrum. The guide seemed quite clear, it made sense, and furthermore it seemed pretty lightweight compared to our usual project management methodologies. …
Sorry, the new Champlain Bridge can’t be built using Agile…
Agility is now indispensable for developing products and services. Indispensable? Really? Perhaps not always. Agile approaches are not the answer to all our woes, and it would be interesting to ask ourselves in which contexts they are most relevant. Why is building a bridge using an Agile approach not a …
When should you let the team fail?
“From now on, we should only communicate by email so we won’t get disturbed unnecessarily and we’ll be able to focus on the code.” We’re in a sprint retrospective. This proposal comes from one of the Scrum team’s developers. It’s quickly applauded by other developers. Even the other members of …
Animate your meetings with Graphic Facilitation
Why write about Graphic Facilitation when everything we need is a drawing? Indeed, I could have made an illustration to explain how to animate your meetings and present the advantages of this practice, but since Google has not yet introduced SEO for pictures, I will write down a bit around …