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Agile Leadership

Experiencing Self-Selection of feature teams

Lately I had the opportunity and pleasure to facilitate a process of designing cross-functional feature teams in a self-selection process. Self-selection is a facilitated way to let people choose which team to work in. It is surprising how rare this practice is sometimes even considered eccentric while practically it is a simple and fast and produces such great results – well-formed teams with more involved and engaged people.

Why teams self-selection?

It’s a fast engaging process that creates the best conditions for a team to reach high performance.

It’s based on the assumption that with the appropriate context, people will choose to work in a team that they feel will make them be most productive, taking into account the personal relationships with the other team members, the complementary skills they bring and their aspirations for personal and professional development.

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Agile Leadership

If they self-organize, what is our role as team leads?

“If they self-organize, what is our role as team leads?”

This is one tough question my managers asked me when I proposed we give eXtreme Programming a try. At the time, this question made me feel very uneasy, and I had a hard time providing some good answers. 15 years later, I think I finally have finally come to terms with the tough issue of management and self-organization.

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Agile Leadership

Agile Release Train Leadership Team – Servant Leadership In Action During PI Planning

Last week I helped facilitate Program Increment (PI) Planning for an Agile Release Train (ART) practicing the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). One impediment for this ART was that although the leadership team ROAMed risks in PI Planning as well as continued to manage the flow of risks/issues using a ROAMing Kanban Board throughout PI execution, there wasn’t enough clarity and alignment around what exactly would Owning a risk look like and what are the expected deliverables/objectives.

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Agile Leadership

The “Manager’s Card”

There is nothing like a good long run for clear thinking and giving rise to new ideas. This post is a result of my weekend run, and it’s about managers and why it is so hard to impact their mindset in the Agile journey.

The idea originated as a result of my experience working with this company where the managers find it extremely difficult to relate to the newly formed scrum teams and instead keep communicating with their original teams (Dev and QA teams) and at the same time keep complaining about how the “scrum teams” are not accountable for their end-to-end deliveries.

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Agile Leadership

Improving Teamwork Through Experiments

A good way to improve how a team works together is to try to run experiments for collaboration. We’ve listed here a set of experiments you may want to try, depending on where your team is in the journey for better teamwork. Each section has a description, a goal for improvement and then the set of experiments that may help achieving the goal.

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