Seriously?
“No company is more Agile than we are!
We just took the most important step in the journey.
Specialized companies and consulting firms –both small and large– have been offering an ‘Agile software tool’ for a long time.
We received brochures, read amazing business cases, and attended remarkable webinars. They are so big and solid, that we constantly see them as ‘trusted’ and ‘gold’ sponsors in conferences –it says a lot!
It is a very expensive software package, but it does everything! It tracks and controls user stories, adds story points, compares teams performance, overlaps feature and epics, shows dependencies, forecasts everything, and even records retrospectives.
Moreover, since one of the foundations of Agile is visualization, it beautifully let us visualize everything –even in the small screen of my phone I can see portfolio, teams and individual goals, execution and performance.
It gives us a great sense of control –similar than the one we used to have before Agile. It is like having a comprehensive Gant Chart, but with nice colors, fancy digital sticky-notes, and fancy words everywhere.
You do not need anything else to be a high-performance organization.
This is what we have learned: as long as everyone in the organization constantly feeds the software, you are truly doing Agile … and being Agile 🙂
We rock!”
“In the government space –including the government contractor market– which is one of the largest industries in the country, we have maturity models and capability models for everything.
The commercial sector do not give a s—! about them: 1) they are BS, 2) they can be fed with BS, and 3) you can accommodate tons of BS in them.
However, for us, they are awesome! It is a way we measure performance, make public our achievements, and even show off when compared with other government agencies. Not to mention we look smart when we mention those topics.
We have adopted Agile for 5 years already, how Agile are we now? Are we mature? Are we already at the top of the Agile Maturity Model?”
Ways to reimagine the future of work
“Management Teams who say things like ‘Get back into the office’ or ‘Return to the way things used to be,’ are missing the opportunity to realize what has been learned.
Instead of deciding for employees, bring them into the discussion.
- Do not make assumptions.
- Take the opportunity to harvest insights from employees on lessons learned and use them to reimagine and evolve work.
- Take advantage of the rich insights gained over the past year to reimagine how you work together.
- Learn what is important to employees.
- Explore how to build on what worked well and experiment with new ideas.
- Get curious about how to evolve the culture of your team and organization.
- Use each discussion as a way to define and gain agreement with your employees and your teams on the best path forward.
- Define team norms for hybrid or virtual work.”
Karen Eber
I have friends working at several 500 Fortune companies. How come only one of them know that this “scaled framework” is being used inside their company?
Either my friends are lying (which I doubt) or someone else is. What is the reason for that?
Start something, experiment, give it a try, talk to people and ask for feedback; then, start again or try something else.
Have in mind that,
- The longer you think about starting something, the less time you will have to experiment.
- The less you experiment, the fewer opportunities you will have to fail and pivot.
If you have not failed, you might not have tried yet.
Ricardo Abella
- Would you like to learn? Look for ways to teach and mentor others!
- Would you like to be useful? Look for ways to teach and mentor others!
- Would you like to feel great? Look for ways to tech and mentor others!
Share your thoughts, share your knowledge, share your point of view, share who you are:
You will learn, be useful and feel great!
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