Culture and collaboration

Leadership is something that can be very hard to define sometimes. For example, the classic definition is to examine the distinction between leadership and management. In some organizations, you also need to make a distinction between leadership and directivity. We seem to forget sometimes that leadership does not only happen …

Heroes are rare gems, references, key players, people who absolutely need to be there. They are linked to projects that do not start without them. Impossible to change something without their approval, they are essential to the proper operation of the business; their knowledge is guarded and sought after. In …

I’ve been working with Agile approaches for nearly 20 years now, and I only learned about Kanban in 2015, when I joined Pyxis. I was immediately curious about this “new form” of Agility, and as an Agile Coach, I decided to learn more about Kanban to expand my toolbox. After …

At a recent Agile meetup, while discussing how human resources could best serve the needs of their Agile teams, I offered some people the opinion that HR should seek to hire people who lived by the values and principles of an Agile organization. I went so far as to offer …

Team self-organization is a powerful force that can foster innovation and motivate team members to do great things. The idea is simple: let the people closest to the customer, those with the greatest insight into customer needs, make the decisions about what they deliver and how they deliver it.  Yet …

Becoming an Agile organization is a profound transformation that requires senior leaders, middle managers, and agile team members to change the way that they organize their work, manage that work, and measure the results of the work. Agile teams cannot do this on their own; they need help from the …

In service of whom? In service of what? These are two powerful questions leaders should ask themselves more often. While some people seem to be natural leaders, behind the scenes they lead in service of something. This article will explore the concept of the leadership noble cause; what is it …

Recently, I presented some of my conclusions after attending (again) the Professional Scrum Product Owner training. As I wrote, the Product Owner’s role remains the vaguest in the Scrum Guide, because it is very dependent on the company in which he evolves. It reads: “The Product Owner is responsible for …

Values drive all organizational life If you pay attention throughout the day, you will see that your thoughts are constantly floating on waves of shifting values. While your thoughts govern your conscious actions, the underlying values directly influence your unconscious behaviours, like shifting in your seat, checking your email, getting …

The Agile Know-how team is pleased to present the third edition of the Agile Know-how Magazine. The theme is self-organization. Take a look, it offers plenty of interesting articles and tools: