18 Jan 2024 | Leadership
All over LinkedIn, my feed is full of people saying Agile is dead or that Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches aren’t needed. I understand both the sentiment and the clickbait nature of this kind of headlines. Though if it were clickbait, people would say the opposite of their title in what they write, but they don’t. They continue to write that agile failed, and these roles and frameworks failed, too.
13 Dec 2023 | Leadership
Two well-known books where leadership and software intersect are The Phoenix Project and The Goal. These books are novelizations of a company that redeems itself by leveraging the Theory of Constraints. While The Phoenix Project is very much a take on The Goal with a software angle, the lesson is the same. So here’s the question: does the Theory of Constraints apply to software development?
08 Dec 2023 | Leadership
In my last article, I went through a few frameworks and mentioned how there are plenty of Scrum Masters eager to prove themselves. They are a peculiar role in most companies, and many Scrum Masters struggle to answer the question, “What is it you do exactly?”
06 Dec 2023 | Leadership
If I were to ever write an article that would prompt an argument online, this is the one. There is so much noise and hand-wringing about the one true agile framework that it is impossible to make sense of things. Sadly that puts our community in a position where it looks like we’re more interested in seeing everyone lose than helping anyone succeed. It also puts leaders in a terrible position of having to wade through the online sludge of before trying to make a choice. So, with that, I am going to give my short, no-nonsense guide to Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe.
15 Nov 2023 | Leadership
For years, folks have struggled with phrases like “self-organizing” and the newer “self-managed” regarding teams. I have met plenty of leaders and managers who have tried to figure out how to create teams with these qualities and find their own place when they work with teams like this. In this article, I want to talk through a few things to consider if you’re a leader interested in building self-managed teams.
10 Nov 2023 | Leadership
Let’s face it: agile conquered the world of software development. Often, though, I find people are dissatisfied with the results, and in this article, I want to point out a few common things that folks struggle with and what you can do to get some of the results that Agile or Scrum promised.
