Do you feel psychologically safe at work?
Context Several years ago, I conducted a skip-level exit interview with a software engineer on my team. I did not work directly with this person in the past year, but I had heard good things about him. I was surprised to learn from him that the main reason for his decision to quit was feeling […]
CHOW #268 – Who do you support?
You are an agile coach working with a group of middle managers as part of an enterprise transformation effort. There are coaches at senior leadership level up in the hierarchy and lower in the scrum team level. Middle managers are going about the transformation effort sincerely and they are feeling stretched to meet the deadlines. […]
Four lessons learnt while coaching leaders
I have been working with leaders in the last few years as an agile coach. When I say ‘leaders’, these are people in middle management roles in large corporates. Intent of this blog is to share some of the lessons I learnt in the process. In the agile world, it is commonly felt that middle […]
YHTAPME – Empathy, the missing angle
Often we look at ‘empathy’ as an ability that is much needed in leadership roles. It is always an ability expected from people higher in the ladder towards those who are below them or at best towards peers. By focusing heavily in this manner, the need for any member to be empathetic towards leaders/managers is […]
CHOW #252 – Release Planning to Continuous Planning
After a leadership awareness session on Continuous Planning & Continuous Delivery, Ram walks up to the coach with a puzzled look. Continuous Planning is expected to help the unit respond faster in a dynamic environment and focus on delivering value. The unit that he leads has been operating with half-yearly releases for the last 5 […]
10 tips to improve Continuous Realization of Value (CRV)
Continuous delivery is a common practice in the software world today enabled by test automation and CI/CD tool chain. Usually, Continuous delivery is well-supported upstream but continuous ‘value’ remains a challenge. How do we address this challenge? Ideally, delivery of value should be assessed by customer adoption and realization of value in the form of […]
Lean Agile Culture – Visual Elements – Part 1
“We are following Agile practices because our teams do daily stand-ups. Our teams are working in Sprints and we are very strict about Sprint and Increment planning. So what more should we be doing?”. Sounds familiar? These are some typical responses from managers and leaders when we ask them about their Agile transformation. The Agile […]
Witness-Mind: Gateway to Empathy
We wonder many times why other people don’t understand us, why they are so wrong in their thinking/ideas/ideologies, why they are so insensitive in their behaviors, and so on… Have we considered the possibility that others may be feeling the same about us? This happens because of lack of empathy. We have certain ‘values’ – what we consider […]
Is it time to change the Scrum Master?
There are many discussions going on in the industry on the appropriateness of the word Scrum Master: Why not Agile Master? Is Scrum = Agile? It’s not gender neutral. Would women playing the role be Scrum Mistress? If it’s about mastery, does just a certificate make someone a Master? If this role is Scrum Master, […]
Agile Transformation: Journey on Treadmill
In many Agile Transformation engagements, we notice that Leaders and Managers take a compliance-led approach – mostly due to the past baggage of traditional ways of management style. They try to push the change top-down on to the Teams. This gives a false perception of things moving fast. But they soon stagnate or go back […]
