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 […]
CHOW #219 – A new manager’s dilemma
Raju had joined a large company in its India operations as a director. Raju’s manager, the India operations head had told Raju that he was getting to build a challenging division. A colleague of his Gagan was incubating this unit along with his primary unit. Gagan had transferred the reporting of the team members to […]
Knowledge Era Paradigms – Fundamental rationale behind Agile
If we observe the practices in the Software industry, we can notice that many of them are strongly influenced by the Industrial era experiences. For example, the hierarchical organization structures, management practices, leadership styles, quality management systems etc. still have the legacy of 300 years of industrial influence which are predominantly derived from the mass-production […]
