Every time I work with a team new to agile transformations, I hear the same question - do we use Scrum or Kanban. Quite often the selection is made out of the fear of the unknown rather than what will work for that team. Let's look at a few reasons why teams don't adopt Kanban even if that is a better fit for them,...
While conducting a leadership boot-camp (a part of a leadership cohort) at Denovo Solutions few weeks ago, one of the participants made an observation that went something like this, “Kumar”, he said, “I don’t mean this in a negative way at all, but what we’ve been discussing over the past couple of days, well, isn’t that what a leader is supposed to do?” What...
Traditional Approaches to Change Management “We live in a world that’s constantly changing, becoming more unstable each day, where changes big and small are becoming more unpredictable” “It’s becoming more difficult to anticipate events or predict how they’ll unfold” “Problems and their repercussions are more multi-layered, harder to understand” “One size fits all” and “best practice” have been relegated to yesterday – in today’s...
DevOps is a hot topic and every enterprise is trying to implement it to stay relevant in the industry. When I was introduced to DevOps I was highly skeptical that it would work because we were talking about over 40 deployments in a day and with lead times that were about 200 times shorter. I was deeply concerned about the security and robustness of...
After facilitating the “Game without Thrones” – an activity that is intended to introduce participants to a descaling paradigm – several times, I’d like to share some learnings. The game itself was great fun to facilitate, and who doesn’t like playing with Lego’s? Autonomy is difficult: One of the main outcomes of the game, and the reason it’s called the Game without thrones, is...
“Do we have to use Scrum?”, “Do we have to use Jira?”, “I’m not sure we can form as dedicated teams”. These were comments and questions I was asked as I was started with a client. The questions they asked were tentative, as if they were afraid of how I’d answer. This was a particularly exciting engagement for me as they weren’t an IT...
The Path from a Scrum Master to Agile Coach What does it mean to be a Scrum Master? The Scrum Guide defines the role as someone who upholds the values and principles of Scrum, someone who helps the rest of the team understand Scrum theory, and who supports their growth and maturity as individuals. Not everyone can perform this role as the skills required...
Most organizations have much more to do than they have time for. And the most common solution to that is to work more hours. The result is almost always the opposite of the intent - the systems gets overloaded and we get lower efficiency and poor quality. Here is a better way of handling this problem....