Culture and collaboration

A successful organizational transformation requires a culture that breaks down traditional silos separating the organization’s various teams. In the case of DevOps, we are looking to bring closer together, or even to merge, the teams responsible for development and for operations. The basic idea is fairly simple: it’s about encouraging …

Employee motivation and engagement is a very hot topic in many organizations. Many companies regularly conduct internal employee engagement surveys throughout the year. Some managers dread receiving the survey results, while others thrive on them. Gallup’s 2017 annual employee engagement survey shows that over 70% of American employees are disengaged. …

Agile approaches generally do not talk about Project Managers, though it’s a role found in many organizations that use these approaches. I am certain that they are not there merely as figureheads! I would like us to take the time to reflect on the Project Manager’s place within an Agile …

When the Scrum framework is introduced within an organization or a team, I often notice a lack of understanding regarding the Project Managers’ role. What do they become in an Agile organization? Do they still have a place? Over a few weeks, several people have asked me these questions. During …

As anyone who has tried to do it knows, changing an organization is painful. Though Agile is intellectually quite simple (the application of empirical principles to software delivery), it can fundamentally challenge deeply held beliefs that have gone unchallenged for years. Challenging these beliefs can be deeply unsettling; it can …

Mission, values and meaning Professional environments are more and more characterized by uncertainty and the unexpected. If I have understood the work of business managers correctly, their job is just about the simplest in the world because we only ask one thing of them: to guarantee results. The only problem is …

Have you noticed, as I did, that the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework for enterprises) training material focuses mainly on the basics of Agility? Well, it’s normal! Even if big organizations have found Agile scaling frameworks to their measure (SAFe, DaD[1], Nexus, and LeSS[2]), it does not exclude the fact that …

Is your organization moving toward a less bureaucratic structure? Is it also looking to remove traditional hierarchical decision-making? Congratulations! Many organizations are undertaking this journey to tackle the growing complexity of the modern workplace. In the context of the world we live in, companies must evolve in this direction to …

Can we be Agile without exploring our fundamental beliefs and those underlying our environment? What beliefs and mental frameworks are there when considering Agility today? These are questions that I have been asking myself regularly for several years whenever I read articles or books or pay attention to my own …

A few days ago, my friend Caro, who is my writing coach, sent me a Whatsapp message: “Julia, we need to postpone our session which was planned on March the 7th. It is Nyepi in Bali, the Day of Silence.” And suddenly, a memory comes to my mind. In March …