Thinkers360
Interested in getting your own thought leader profile? Get Started Today.

John Coleman

agility strategist at Orderly Disruption Limited

London, United Kingdom

John Coleman, Leadershum Top 50 Agile and Top 200 Biggest Voices in Leadership, is the founder of Orderly Disruption.

He is also a Thinkers360 top 10 agility thought leader, Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer, co-author of Kanban Guide and Prokanban.org Professional Kanban Trainer, LeSS Friendly Scrum Trainer, founder and host of Xagility™ and Agility Island podcasts.

Linktree: https://linktr.ee/johncolemanxagility

Available For: Advising, Authoring, Consulting, Influencing, Speaking
Travels From: London, UK
Speaking Topics: executive agility, measurement, growth of sustainable authentic organizational agility, scaling, de-scaling, Lean UX, Kanban, Scrum, Nexus, LeSS

John Coleman Points
Academic 90
Author 620
Influencer 20
Speaker 53
Entrepreneur 70
Total 853

Points based upon Thinkers360 patent-pending algorithm.

Thought Leader Profile

Portfolio Mix

Company Information

Company Type: Company
Business Unit: agility, executives
Theatre: North America, Ireland, UK, continental Europe, Middle East
Minimum Project Size: Undisclosed
Average Hourly Rate: Undisclosed
Number of Employees: Undisclosed
Company Founded Date: Undisclosed
Media Experience: 15+
Last Media Interview: 03/15/2022

Areas of Expertise

Agile 56.52
Business Strategy 32.05
Change Management 50.41
Climate Change
Culture 30.99
Customer Experience 31.76
Design Thinking 30.59
Digital Disruption 31.15
Digital Transformation 30.09
Emerging Technology 30.25
Entrepreneurship 30.23
FinTech 30.06
Future of Work 30.02
HR 30.24
Innovation 30.51
Leadership 35.96
Lean Startup 34.51
Management 41.41
Marketing 30.40
Procurement 30.12
Project Management 31.07
Risk Management 30.35
Startups
Sustainability
Open Innovation 30.34
Coaching 30.67
Creativity 31.71

Industry Experience

Aerospace & Defense
Automotive
Consumer Products
Engineering & Construction
Financial Services & Banking
Healthcare
Higher Education & Research
Manufacturing
Oil & Gas
Pharmaceuticals
Professional Services
Retail
Telecommunications
Travel & Transportation
Utilities

Exclusive Content    Join John Coleman's VIP Club

Publications

42 Article/Blogs
I’m fed up with organizational dysfunctionality
X Agility
December 16, 2022
Some say Agile doesn’t work. I say it’s dysfunctional organizations that don’t work.
For example, the best ideas in the world are unlikely to save the UK’s National Health Service because the organization is so dysfunctional. Perhaps you can think of another example more local to you. Sadly, that’s likely not hard to do. Large, dysfunctional organizations abound.

See publication

Tags: Management, Leadership, Agile

What is Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)?
Import from medium.com
October 08, 2022
What is LeSS?LeSS is a de-scaling framework. Also referred to sometimes as a scaling framework.AimsimplificationDesigned forproduct developmentQueueing TheoryOne of the principles in LeSS is queuing theory. Kanban comes from a similar place in that you try to stop starting and start finishing.The m

See publication

Talking about Sizing and Forecasting in Scrum
Infoq
August 04, 2022
Key Takeaways
Avoid story points, counting non-valuable product backlog items, counting unDone work as Done, use of averages
Consider historical reference items but beware of accidental complication
Try probabilistic forecasting based on counting valuable product backlog items to Done
Try #NoEstimates and “rolling wave forecasts” of valuable product backlog items to Done
For complex work, promote managing expectations about uncertainty over managing expectations about dates

See publication

Tags: Leadership, Agile, Change Management

Can Scrum be used outside software development?
Import from medium.com
August 02, 2022
Can agile be used outside software development? Absolutely. There’s something very important though. In terms of credibility of you as a leader or as a coach or practitioner working with people in non-software, there is a brand that goes along with a lot of agile folks that they’re working softw

See publication

Who is responsible for a scrum team’s performance?
Import from medium.com
July 04, 2022
Who’s responsible for a scrum team’s performance?There was a big change in the 2020 scrum guide. The scrum master is now on the hook for the effectiveness of the scrum team. So the buck stops with the scrum master. And the reason that this was introduced, I believe, was to stop situations where

See publication

What is Cycle Time in Kanban?
Import from medium.com
July 04, 2022
What is cycle time?I’m not going to redefine the dictionary. There’s lots of documentation in manufacturing, for example, about what cycle time is. In the Kanban guide, we have a specific meaning for this. The Kanban guide is aimed at knowledge work when people are using their brain to get some

See publication

What is Cycle Time?
Medium
July 04, 2022
What is cycle time?

I’m not going to redefine the dictionary. There’s lots of documentation in manufacturing, for example, about what cycle time is. In the Kanban guide, we have a specific meaning for this. The Kanban guide is aimed at knowledge work when people are using their brain to get some work done, when we’re not creating widgets, for example, when each work item that comes in is a different type of a problem that involves different skills and so on.

Cycle time is where we’re measuring how long a work item takes to get from one part of our workflow to another part of our workflow.

The definition of workflow will have a started point and a finish point. You can have more than one started point and more than one finish point. For example, if you’re doing software, you could have a cycle time for development and testing. You could also have a cycle time for refinement, right sizing, through development, through testing, through goal life . Or you could have another one that goes even further that gets feedback from the customers.

So you could have any number of cycle times. A cycle time will have a starting point and a finish point and is about how long does it take? How long does the work item take to get from one point to the other. A lot of people ask me should we measure work time or work days, for example, or elapsed time?

It’s about elapsed time. There are a number of reasons for this. For example, if teams did actually work weekends, we hope they’re not working weekends, and you had some weeks where there was much more throughput and more work items were delivered that would be captured by doing it over a calendar of days, we would see how much work was done in calendar days. If you focus on work time, we have different public holidays and different parts of the world. Our cycle time for this, well we won’t include Diwali for example, or we won’t include Eid or we won’t include Christmas, or we won’t include summer holidays.

Oh, Daniela is gone on holidays. Oh, Alessandra’s gone on holidays. . And before you know, it, you’ve got eroding standards in terms of what cycle time means. And it’s just more simple to stick to calendar days. And it’s even more deep than that though, because if I start something today and I finish it today Cycle time is one.

It’s not zero. We round it up by one. So it’s the difference between the finish date and the start date if I’m using days. And I add one that runs it up to the cycle time, cycle time is how long does it take for a work item to get from a started point to a finished point over time, you will notice a pattern of how long different work items take.

And from that you can maybe plot cycle times on a cycle time, scatter plot. You can see over time different durations for how long work takes. And you can lift a ruler up that page and see where maybe 70% of the cycle times are done, or maybe even 85% of the cycle times are done. And from that, you can create a service level expectation.

You can say based on our history, 85% of items are done in 12 days or less. So our service level expectation is 12 days or less. It’s not a guarantee it’s based on an item that comes into our system that has been right sized. No elephants or mammoths coming to the system as long as the items are right sized.

We can get them done in 12 days or less. And once you have an SLE, you can improve your right sizing. Cause you can say instead of saying, is this an elephant or a mammoth? You can say does this feel like one of these items you can do in 12 days or less? Because if not, we need to break it down.

We need to make it smaller. So cycle time is how long does it take an item to get from a starter point to a finish point, you can have a number of starter points and a number of finish points you can even have a cycle time for an individual column on your workflow. That’s my nudge on cycle time.

Thank you.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Who is responsible for a scrum team's performance?
Medium
July 04, 2022
Who’s responsible for a scrum team’s performance?

There was a big change in the 2020 scrum guide. The scrum master is now on the hook for the effectiveness of the scrum team. So the buck stops with the scrum master. And the reason that this was introduced, I believe, was to stop situations where scrum masters were asking lots of Socratic questions and doing lots of observation, which is a really good thing to do. But they were just watching this and bad behavior was happening on their watch. Unhealthy conflict was happening on their watch. The team’s performance was going down on their watch. And so it was felt that it was a good move to have somebody on the hook for the effectiveness of the team.

Now it gets a bit tricky because the developers need to be self-managing. The scrum team is self-managing. And really the interventions from a scrum master should be in the case where it feels like the team is descending into chaos, bad things are happening and the scrum master needs to step in to make sure that bad things don’t happen.

We’re all ultimately responsible for our own performance. The developers, are responsible for delivering a high-quality increment, the product owner for maximizing the value that goes through the scrum team, the scrum master needs to be coaching, mentoring, teaching, advising, observing, helping people in all sorts of different stances, helping the product owner, helping the developers, but also helping the organization so that the scrum team can be effective.

And that means sometimes that the scrum master needs to go beyond the team, work with other teams that we depend on. Maybe work with other functions, maybe help to declutter, some processes workflows and so on. Even de-clutter the product, cause sometimes there’s too many features in the product, keeping the product order, some hints that maybe the product, the service needs to be simplified so that we get more engagement from our customers and end-users.

Ultimately short answer is the scrum master. Thank you.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Who writes the acceptance criteria?
Import from medium.com
June 29, 2022
Who writes acceptance criteria?. Should you even have acceptance criteria? It’s a loaded question, because it’s assuming that we’re using user stories. And in user stories typically you might say in order to deliver a particular type of value, some particular persona wants or needs something i

See publication

Setting Expectations in Scrum and Monte Carlo Probabilistic Forecasting
Import from medium.com
June 27, 2022
When we don’t know what we don’t know, it’s kind of silly to come up with a Gantt chart saying, we’ll all be done by Christmas, but this is exactly what people do. They predict what they’re going to do in future sprints, if they’re using scrum and in future months if they’re using Kan

See publication

Why you might need an island of agility?
Infoq
June 07, 2022
Organizational agility is highly dependent on how well the environment is cultivated for agility to grow and sustained.
Pathways to organizational agility are numerous, some evolutionary, some revolutionary.
Forming a culture bubble of agility is an evolutionary approach.
Following an isolation pattern is a temporary approach.
Creating an island of agility is a revolutionary and positively disruptive approach.
Start slowly. Expand carefully. Improve carefully.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Leadership

So, what is organizational agility? 2022 UPDATE
John Coleman agility chef
February 11, 2022
I learn all the time, and 2021 taught me a lot. Based on those lessons, I’d like to share an update on what organizational agility means to me in 2022. I hope you find it useful for what it does and does not mean for you.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management

How can Scrum with Kanban help people solve complex problems?
John Coleman agility chef
February 07, 2022
Let’s approach this from a slightly different angle by looking at how Scrum with Kanban can help people deal with complexity.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

How to use Evidence-Based Management and Scrum (Part 1): Bridging EBM goals with the Scrum Guide
John Coleman
September 10, 2021
Scrum.org developed its Evidence-Based Management (EBM) practices placing a strong emphasis on goals and experimentation. EBM's key value areas are also important, but the critical focus is on goals and how to use them to achieve further organizational gain.

This part I of a three-part series will focus on goals. We’ll examine how the goals set out in the EBM guide correspond to the Scrum Guide and some tools and formats for setting workable goals. Part II will focus on experimentation, and Part III will focus on measurement.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Management

Tobias Mayer on Agility
John Coleman
July 16, 2021
There are loads of blog posts, articles and podcasts about agile - what it should be, what it should do, how it should look? The problem is that a lot of what’s out there is hypothetical and not based on field experience.


Tobias Mayer, author of The People's Scrum, and the upcoming audiobook, The State of Work joins this Xagility episode. Using funny anecdotes as well as real-life experiences, John and Tobias bring you a raw yet inspiring account of agile in motion, a consolidation of a decade of experience right to your ears.

See publication

Tags: Agile

Haydn Shaughnessy - Digital Transformation hero
LinkedIn
June 02, 2021
Sadly, Haydn Shaughnessy passed away on 28th May after a short illness. My sincerest condolences go to Haydn’s family, relatives & friends.

I shall miss my conversations with Haydn. I met him in 2000 in a startup incubator scheme after which my startup failed dismally. Both of us reinvented into a similar but different space since then. Haydn was always the smarter one. He was incredibly well-read; he wrote on the Irish Times, Forbes, and HBR, and most recently he regularly hit number one or top-10 on several Thinkers 360 lists.

See publication

Tags: Digital Transformation, Innovation, Future of Work, Agile

Pia Maria Thoren and John Coleman discuss agility & its importance
Medium
May 11, 2021
Pia Maria Thoren joins John Coleman as his guest in the first episode of the Xagility podcast.

See publication

Tags: Agile

Why organizations need to widen the scope of agile, and how to start?
Medium
May 11, 2021
Join us for an insightful, knowledgeable, and humorous adventure as this group discusses the reasons for and benefits of organizations widening the scope of agile.

See publication

Tags: Agile

lDiscussing “Agendashift” with Mike Burrows
Medium
May 11, 2021
Lean, Agile, and Kanban pioneer Mike Burrows joins John in this episode to chat about his book AgendaShift, which explores ways to engage every employee, at every level, in the process of change.

See publication

Tags: Agile

​So what is organizational agility?
Medium.com
April 12, 2021
Have you ever noticed people keep talking about things, but they’ve not aligned with what their words mean? I have seen agility measured as the number of “agile teams” and the “number of training attendees” more often than I like to admit.
Maybe we can talk about what organizational agility is not — in a word — bs. For example, re-labeling, predictability for uncertainty, or old-fashioned micro-management and fear. Why? Because psychological safety enables cognitive diversity, which enables better handling of complexity.

See publication

Tags: Agile

So, what is value, really?
John Coleman
April 11, 2021
If people optimize value or maximize value, it would be nice to understand what value is.
The dictionary definition is open to interpretation. I’d like us to be a little clearer for agility.

Let’s talk about what value is not:
- inputs such as budget, people allocation/assignment
- things to do that contribute to the creation of value also known as “activities”, e.g., sub-tasks to valuable work items, technical stuff that does not directly delivers value
- Outputs aka “stuff”, e.g., a “done” work item that is un-released in a Kanban context or a “done” increment that is un-released in a Scrum context

See publication

Tags: Agile, Management

Ask John about Kanban as per https://kanbanguides.org
YouTube
February 22, 2021
Ask John about Kanban. John Coleman is co-author of Kanban Guide. He is also the author of Kanplexity, with heavy attribution to the creator of Cynefin.

See publication

Tags: Agile

2020 Scrum Guide — addition of commitments to each artifact
Medium
November 18, 2020
The words “commit” and “commitment” feature prominently in the 2020 Scrum Guide, and it’s not just about the artifacts.
“The Scrum Team commits to achieving its goals and to supporting each other… when the Scrum Team and the people they work with embody these values, the empirical Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection, and adaptation come to life building trust.”
The Scrum Values contribute to people trusting and supporting each other. Let’s trust people, give trust, respect, and not expect people to need to earn it. And let’s continually improve together.

See publication

Tags: Agile

Don’t be an apprentice in the negative sense of the word
Import from medium.com
November 12, 2019
Non-team commitmentsAs an executive leader, do you can still make commitments on behalf of your teams? Do you play the cynical game of accepting a plan you’ve insisted on because now somebody else is on the hook for delivery? Even if you shifted the blame, will your chickens come home to roost at

See publication

Tags: Leadership, Agile

Kanban - the Flow Strategy and Kanban for Complexity (Kanplexity)
Orderly Disruption Limited and Daniel S. Vacanti, Inc.
September 27, 2019
Kanban - the Flow Strategy is a minimal guide for Kanban for knowledge work. Kanban for Complexity (Kanplexity) is an addendum for complex work.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Leadership

8 Author Newsletters
Bulls? Bears? Wall Street's pigs at the trough
Linkedln
February 24, 2024
Some companies are so messed up that they are almost impossible to fix. Hopefully, that's not the case at Boeing (471, 472). It's often easier to start a new company with a new culture, and that's what it should do.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

The black hole - a story of indigestion and constipation
Linkedln
February 18, 2024
Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a retail service company struggled to survive. Only sizeable distressed investments and vertical integration kept the company in the competitive game.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

MORE SUCCESS
Linkedln
February 04, 2024
MORE SUCCESS is for those who want long-term and short-term success, those who wish to leave a legacy of prestige and successful successors, and those who want to lead the way to being led by others. It's not for those only interested in quick fixes, looking good, or doing the bare minimum to satisfy shareholder, legal, moral, or psychological needs. Thinking and experimentation for change require energy.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Leave the place tidier than you found it.
Linkedln
January 29, 2024
Imagine...
The technical debt is a mess- metaphorically, the office and the kitchen are a mess.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Agile Vs. Scrum – what is the difference?
Linkedln
January 22, 2024
Scrum predates the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, often known as the Agile Manifesto. And Scrum inherits from Lean. Scrum is only one of many options from the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

A Workforce Of Multi-Skilled People – what's in it for the executive or the employee?
Linkedln
January 16, 2024
As an executive, while you will focus on finding the “next billion dollar” idea, you need workforce skill flexibility as innovation or invention is not something one plans for.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Clarity, Strategy Deployment, and Strategy Realization
Linkedln
January 08, 2024
Tom Gilb's published books, Competitive Engineering (292), and Principles of Software Engineering Management (172, 435), are classics.
In this newsletter, I blend (mostly) Tom's work with some of my 2024 thoughts on clarity and strategy realization, with Tom's permission. I also include some of Karl Scotland's thoughts on Strategy Deployment.

See publication

Tags: Change Management, Leadership

The nature of the human condition
Linkedln
August 12, 2023
Nearly one hundred years after Napoleon Hill taught people how to become trainers to help other people become successful without any proof his students could do as they teach, SAFe continues its racket where one can become a trainer on SAFe without any experience of SAFe. Such is the nature of the human condition.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

1 Book Chapter
Pivot: Real Cut Through Stories by Experts at the Frontline of Agility and Transformation
Writing Matters Publishing (UK); 1 edition (20 Jun. 2018)
June 20, 2018
Pivot is an inspiring and informative collection of cut through stories from 17 experts at the frontline of agility and organizational transformation.

Edited by Matt Bradley and Adrian Stalham from the Agility Gigs Community, and business author, Andrew Priestley, it features contributions from Adrian Stalham, Jacqueline Shakespeare, Scott Potter, Brett Ansley, Wayne Palmer, Matt Bradley, Bhavesh Vaghela, Angie Main, Karan Jain, Andrew Kidd, David Smith, Ahmed Syed, John Coleman, Mike Nuttall, Bruce Thompson, Jessica Gilbert, and John Boyes.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Culture, Leadership

1 Courseware
What is executive agility, why is it needed, and how to get there?
You Tube
October 24, 2022
What is executive agility, why is it needed, and how to get there?

John Coleman will walk through the Xagility executive agility framework to offer potential answers to these questions.

Sometimes, you’ve got leadership buy-in for embracing Agile but work within a legacy-driven environment. Integrating the old and the new takes time, effort and conscious design.

We help you create Agile islands that empower you to tap into the benefits of business agility frameworks and Agile product development whilst your organization works through its Agile transformation organically.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

1 eBook
Kanplexity
Orderly Disruption Limited
September 30, 2022
An agile approach for non-software. Aims to help people with product management, project management, Agile, Lean, DevOps, The Vanguard Method etc.

See publication

Tags: Lean Startup, Leadership, Agile

3 Founders
X-agility Executive Agility
Website
August 01, 2022
Executive Agility designed for the 21st Century.
Agile leaders thrive in times of uncertainty and volatility because they have the frameworks, mindset and supporting culture of business agility that empowers them to adapt, respond and innovate when it matters most.
We specialise in Executive Agility, Kanban and Scaling Agile for organizations.
Sometimes, you’ve got leadership buy-in for embracing Agile but work within a legacy-driven environment. Integrating the old and the new takes time, effort and conscious design.

We help you create Agile islands that empower you to tap into the benefits of business agility frameworks and Agile product development whilst your organization works through its Agile transformation organically.

Services:
XAgility Training
XAgility Coaching
XAgility Consulting

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Basic/ally Agile
Instagram
April 25, 2022
A platform for those wanting to start their agile, scrum and kanban journey, intentionally designed to help with learning the basics. From the 5 scrum values to industry job application tips, you'll find it all here.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

Orderly Disruption
https://orderlydisruption.com/
May 01, 2014
Founded Orderly Disruption.com, home of executive agility, scaling, scrum.org and prokanban high quality learning.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Digital Disruption

1 Influencer Award
Top 50 Agile Leaders of 2022
LeadersHum.com
October 13, 2022
Agile leadership is essential if an organization strives to remove roadblocks by helping them learn, change and succeed.
LeadersHum is a free community that enables global leaders, thinkers, and coaches to voice their opinion through blogs, videos, ebooks, etc and they have named John Coleman in their Top 50 Agile Leaders of 2022. See the blog in the link below.

See publication

Tags: Agile

1 Infographic
Journey to an Agile Island
https://orderlydisruption.com/
March 29, 2022
Journey to an Agile Island

See publication

Tags: Agile, Design Thinking, Management

2 Keynotes
Why you might need an agility island?
7N Agile Day
September 02, 2022
Talk given for 7N Agile Day.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Hit Delete - unlocking executive agility one deletion at a time
LinkedIn - Lithe Transformation™ – Agile Consultancy
January 11, 2022
Let's explore the unintended consequences of expecting teams to be agile when we haven't cultivated the right environment. Instead of buying "agility in a box," what can we do to foster the growth of authentic, sustainable organizational agility? Part of the answer might be in improving executive agility. Glacial evolution at the executive level often results in people giving up hope on the dream of organizational agility, even those initially enthusiastic about it. There are agility frameworks tailored for teams, teams of teams, managers, leaders, finance, and people operations. This talk will focus on executives in tech and non-tech environments and the people supporting them. Let's look at how deleting specific executive behaviors could avoid the feeling that agility is just about teams. Perhaps we can attain executive agility by deleting unhelpful behaviors one at a time. We don't have a proven recipe, but maybe we can strive to have fewer "agile-gone-wrong stories" by better understanding the urgency required for these deletions?

In this discussion, we'll explore:

The observable executive behaviors that might indicate what to address first.
Actionable steps towards deleting the above behaviors.
Being aware of side effects from starting elsewhere.
Real-life examples about the impact deleting certain behaviors had on organizational agility.
Where you can begin to affect change.

See publication

Tags: Culture, Agile, Change Management

5 Media Interviews
Indi Young on why you shouldn't look at a problem through the aperture of a solution
Youtube
March 15, 2022
In this video version of the Xagility podcast, the incredible Indi Young joins me to talk about why you shouldn't look at a problem through the aperture of a solution and the effect this can have on overall performance. Packed with metaphors and anecdotes, this episode is the perfect mix of fun stories and incredible wisdom.

Indi's website: https://indiyoung.com/
Indi's book: https://indiyoung.com/books-time-to-l...

Episode transcript available here: https://share.descript.com/view/Td8V7...

Alternatively, if you wish to listen in audio format:
https://linktr.ee/johncolemanxagility

See publication

Tags: Change Management, Culture, Customer Experience

ProKanban Trainer, John Coleman on: Why do you think Kanban is integral to the future of agile?
Youtube
February 09, 2022
Join John Coleman, founder of Orderly Disruption, Thinkers360 top 10 agility thought leader, Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer, co-author of Kanban Guide and Prokanban.org Professional Kanban Trainer, LeSS Friendly Scrum Trainer, founder and host of Xagility and Daily Flow podcasts, for a quick look into a PKTs opinion on the thought-provoking question “Why do you think Kanban is integral to the future of agile?”

Continue to the YouTube Playlist “Question Series: Why do you think Kanban is integral to the future of agile?” To listen to more of our PKTs addressing this difficult question.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

An interview with Jared Spool
Youtube
December 29, 2021
Jared M. Spool is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre – UIE. Center Centre is the school he started with Leslie Jensen-Inman to create industry-ready User Experience Designers. UIE is Center Centre’s professional development arm, dedicated to understanding what it takes for organizations to produce competitively great products and services.

In the 43 years he’s been in the tech field, he’s worked with hundreds of organizations, written two books, published hundreds of articles and podcasts, and tours the world speaking to audiences everywhere. When he can, he does his laundry in Andover, Massachusetts.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Culture

HOW TO GO INTERIM | Top 3 Tips with John Coleman
Youtube
April 10, 2017
Agility Change Chef John Coleman gives his top 3 tips to becoming an interim.

An interview given for Sullivan & Stanley.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

An interview with John Coleman
Youtube
March 28, 2017
We chat with S&S associate and Agility Change Chef John Coleman on agility, organisational collaboration and being an interim.

An interview given for Sullivan & Sullivan

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

1 Miscellaneous
Xagility podcast - Pia-Maria Thorén of Agile People
Anchor.fm
March 18, 2021
John Coleman interviews leading executives and top folks from agility. The inconvenient truth is that agility can't be bought in a box. Take the hard choices and make a difference. Try Agile, Lean/Agile for the c-suite.

See publication

Tags: Agile, HR, Leadership

3 Panels
Flight Levels Day
Flight Levels
October 10, 2022
Many companies have succeeded in creating agile teams. However, only a few have achieved the desired outcome of becoming an organization that acts agile on the market and possesses a value-driven culture.
How to transform agile promises into reality?
How to improve collaboration across teams but also across the whole organization?
How to facilitate complex cooperation with multiple teams that depend on each other?
How to enable continuous management alignment with high-level corporate objectives?
How to scale successful agile implementation in large organizations?

During Flight Levels Day, all of these questions will be answered by managers and coaches who have used Flight Levels to run a successful and lasting agile transformation. Discover their success stories and learn from their failures. You are welcome to share one of your experiences, good or bad, during the conference.

The conference is aimed at managers of all levels, product managers, agile coaches, and anyone who wants to bring business agility to their organization.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Panel of experts
Flight Levels
October 10, 2022
John Coleman was on a panel of experts at the international Flight Levels conference 2022. Flight Levels is an approach to organizational agility.

See program at https://fld.inside-agile.com

See publication

Tags: Culture, Agile, Change Management

Flight Levels Conference - Experts Panel
Flight Levels
September 08, 2022
Many companies have succeeded in creating agile teams. However, only a few have achieved the desired outcome of becoming an organization that acts agile on the market and possesses a value-driven culture.
How to transform agile promises into reality?
How to improve collaboration across teams but also across the whole organization?
How to facilitate complex cooperation with multiple teams that depend on each other?
How to enable continuous management alignment with high-level corporate objectives?
How to scale successful agile implementation in large organizations?

During Flight Levels Day, all of these questions will be answered by managers and coaches who have used Flight Levels to run a successful and lasting agile transformation. Discover their success stories and learn from their failures. You are welcome to share one of your experiences, good or bad, during the conference.

The conference is aimed at managers of all levels, product managers, agile coaches, and anyone who wants to bring business agility to their organization.



FORMAT OF THE CONFERENCE:
Learn from Flight Levels Practitioners during six 30-minute presentations
Share your “aha” moments with others in an open Q&A and summary session with speakers
Meet Flight Levels Guides and Flight Levels Coaches in two live discussion panels with experts
Review everything that you have learned in a combined summary session with all speakers

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

35 Podcasts
Matt Young on his career UserVoice product management, scrum and the importance of customer opinions
Youtube
January 19, 2023
Matt Young, CEO of UserVoice and speaker within the product management circle joins John Coleman on the Xagility Podcast to discuss Scrum, Product management and listening to the customers opinions on products.

About Matt:
Matt is a SaaS, product management, and software engineering leader passionate about sustainable, high-performing teams. Challenging what it means to deliver a great SaaS product.

Connect with Matt on:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcyoung/

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Customer Experience

John Carter on BOSE Noise-Canceling Headphones, the BOSE Culture, invention marketing and agile
Youtube
January 17, 2023
How did John start his career at Bose? How was the noise-canceling headphones invention born? How do you market innovations? John Carter brings his immense knowledge and experience to this episode of the Xagility podcast.

John Carter has been a widely respected adviser to technology firms over his career. John is the author of "Innovate Products Faster: Graphical Tools for Accelerating Product Development." As Founder and Principal of TCGen Inc., he has advised some of the most revered technology firms in the world:

• Abbott, Amazon, Apple
• BOSE, Cisco, Fitbit
• HP, IBM, Roche

He specializes in the value-creating aspects of product development – from the strategy and innovation processes through product definition, execution and launch. He has helped companies cut time to market, rapidly scales their product program, and improve innovation with customer-led insights, leading to greater profitability, reduced costs, and improved customer satisfaction.

John currently serves on the Board of Directors of Cirrus Logic (CRUS), a leading supplier of mixed-signal semiconductors. He is involved with company strategy and sits on the Compensation and Audit Committees.

He was the founder of Cambridge-based Product Development Consulting, Inc. (PDC), a consultancy advising Fortune 500 companies in the areas of research, development, and marketing. During his time there, he worked with Apple to create the Apple New Product Process (ANPP), which is used in all product divisions. He has been an invited speaker at MIT and Stanford University and a member of the faculty at Case Western’s Executive program.

Before starting PDC, John was the Chief Engineer of BOSE Corporation. John is the inventor of the Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones and shares the original patent with Dr. Amar Bose. He was one of the initial contributors to BOSE’s entry into the automotive OEM business. He led the product and business development of BOSE’s patented noise reduction technology for the military market. He earned his MS in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BS in engineering from Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, CA.

John Carter's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcartertc...

See publication

Tags: Agile, Innovation, Marketing

Balancing UX with shipping fast in scrum? A deeper look into each box of the Lean UX canvas
Orderly Disruption
December 04, 2022
Is there such thing as balancing UX with shipping fast in scrum? Is there even such thing as shipping fast in scrum? How can we know what is value when we don't know the end-user?

What happens in each box of the Lean UX canvas?

See publication

Tags: Agile, Customer Experience, Management

Klaus Leopold on the value of Flight Levels and his book Rethinking Agile
You Tube
November 07, 2022
In this week's X Agility podcast, John Coleman speaks to Klaus Leopold about the concept of #flightlevels and his book, Rethinking Agile.

Visit https://www.x-agility.com for more about X Agility, Executive Agility, Agile Leadership and navigating complexity in the product development space.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

What is Product Management? Matt Young, CEO of UserVoice tells all.
Anchor.fm
October 20, 2022
Matt Young is the CEO of User Voice and considered to be one of the most progressive, Agile executives in the industry.

In this week's X Agility podcast, we feature an excerpt from John Coleman and Matt Young about the challenges of product management and product ownership.

Watch the full premium podcast on https://anchor.fm/xagility/episodes/I...

Connect with Me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncolem...
Connect with Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattcyoung/

For training and a variety of useful resources check out: https://orderlydisruption.com/

#agile #agileleadership #businessagility #productdevelopment #productmanagement

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

X Agility Podcast: Joe Justice
X Agility Podcast
August 25, 2022
Joe Justice - founder of WIKISPEED - brings his extensive expertise and humour on this episode of the Xagility podcast!
Joe Justice is author of Scrum Master, published in 7 languages. Joe has worked with Bill Gates, the leadership team at Amazon, and operated the Agile program at Tesla for Elon Musk.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Project Management

Constraints, work capability, throughput and flow
Anchor.fm
June 15, 2022
Do you know what your team or team of teams capability to take on work is? How can throughput help? Using real-world examples, this episode aims to outline work capability and throughput.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

Joe Justice on his career, Tesla, Space X and agility
Anchor.fm
May 31, 2022
Joe Justice, founder of WIKISPEED, brings his extensive expertise and humour on this episode of the Xagility podcast!

Joe Justice is author of Scrum Master, published in 7 languages. Joe has worked with Bill Gates, the leadership team at Amazon, and operated the Agile program at Tesla for Elon Musk. Joe founded WIKISPEED which became an example of automotive design and production speed in a fun, egalitarian culture. Joe enjoys collaborating as a board member, writing, teaching, and running companies to make a good future arrive faster.

Joe's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joejustice
John's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncolem...

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Business Strategy

What the developers do in the last week of the sprint?
Anchor.fm
April 29, 2022
Do you think work should be handed off once it meets the definition of done? On this episode, I talk about how developers should collaborate with the 'testers' and the important role that plays overall. Tune in, you might find some useful tips.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

Can scrum and agility be scaled and what’s the best way to do it?
Anchor.fm
April 27, 2022
In this episode, I talk you through some of the different ways and frameworks you can use to scale scrum and agile. The first rule is of course not scale but if you must, here are some ways to do so:

3:27 LeSS - what is it and how does it work?

6:29 Disciplined agile - what is it and how does it work?

7:21 Scrum at scale - what is it and how does it work?

8:21 SAFe - what is it and how does it work?

9:55 Nexus - what is it and how does it work?

11:43 Spotify ING - what is it and how does it work?

12:29 Flight Levels - what is it and how does it work?

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Management

Gene Gendel on his LeSS career, LeSS case studies and whether we can measure adaptiveness
Anchor.fm
April 26, 2022
The one and only Gene Gendel joins us on this episode of the Xagility podcast. Amongst other important topics, the speaker discusses important nuances such as the geographical restraint to agile adoption, whether LeSS is a framework and the importance of getting executives onboard with LeSS adoptions.

0:00 On the beginning of large scale scrum (LeSS) and his journey into LeSS

9:19 The fallacy big corporations have on the need to scale

12:57 LeSS Case Studies steps and the rigorous process

17:30 Is there such thing as a level of readiness organizations must consider when adopting LeSS?

20:13 Getting executives onboard with the product mindset

21:38 Can we measure adaptiveness?







See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

Value and Kanban: isn't Kanban just about outputs?
Anchor.fm
April 25, 2022
How do we deliver value in Kanban? What are the 4 key values of Evidence Based Management and what role do they play in delivering value in Kanban?

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

Bruce McCarthy on his career, product vs project management and, getting roadpmaps right
Anchor.fm
April 14, 2022
This week, the Xagility podcast has the pleasure of welcoming the amazing Bruce McCarthy.
Bruce has authored Product Manager versus Project Manager and co-authored Product Roadmaps Reloaded: how to set direction while embracing uncertainty along with C Todd Lombardo, Evan Ryan, and Michael Connors.
In this episode, Bruce and John discuss the definition of product, product vs project management, probabilistic forecasting, and the importance of using roadmaps right.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Digital Disruption, Management

Jim Benson on Personal Kanban, The Collaboration Equation and the system of Humane Management
Anchor.fm
March 29, 2022
Jim Benson joins John Coleman on this week's episode to discuss a lifetime of experience, Jim's Book 'The Collaboration Equation', the system of humane management, leadership & tangibles as well as advice on how to tackle the common stakeholder question 'when will it be done?', what goes on in the obeya rooms and why the most beautiful boards look like a huge mess.

Time stamps:
1:10 - Jim’s story & the beginning of Modus Cooperandi
4:25 - Coping strategies for large scale projects with lots of dependencies
6:49 - Jim’s book ‘The Collaboration Equation’
8:22 - Personal Kanban: a deeper look
13:25 - The system of humane management
24:09 - Leadership & tangibles
27:05 - ‘When will it be done?’
31:57 - Obeya Rooms
44:34 - ‘The most beautiful board looks like a fricking mess’

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

Daily Flow - dealing with complexity in a Kanban footprint
Anchor.fm
March 16, 2022
How can we better deal with complexity in a Kanban footprint? Join me in this short episode to explore how.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Management

Daily Flow: a story about story points and an alternative, throughput
Anchor.fm
March 15, 2022
In this episode, I go through some field stories regarding story points - why you shouldn't use them and offer alternatives.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

Indi Young on why you shouldn't look at a problem through the aperture of a solution
Anchor.fm
March 15, 2022
the incredible Indi Young joins me to talk about why you shouldn't look at a problem through the aperture of a solution and the effect this can have on overall performance. Packed with metaphors and anecdotes, this episode is the perfect mix of fun stories and incredible wisdom.

Indi's website: https://indiyoung.com/
Indi's book: https://indiyoung.com/books-time-to-l...

Episode transcript available here: https://share.descript.com/view/Td8V7...

Alternatively, if you wish to listen in audio format:
https://linktr.ee/johncolemanxagility

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Culture

Daily Flow: Sizing & Forecasting
Anchor.fm
March 14, 2022
Popular patterns for sizing including "exact" time/cost, relative, right-sizing, and #noestimates. Popular patterns for forecasting include Gantt charts(ugh!), burnup/down charts(hmmm), and probabilistic forecasting(oooo). An emerging trend is with right-sizing and probabilistic forecasting. It's not all sunshine and honey, context matters, and it's dangerous to over-simplify. Let's laser focus on the upsides and downsides of each of these options.

Time Stamps:
0:00 Approaches & Their Upsides
9:00 Downsides of Approaches
19:02 Approaches for Forecasting

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Management

An interview with Jared Spool
John Coleman
December 16, 2021
Jared M. Spool is a Maker of Awesomeness at Center Centre – UIE. Center Centre is the school he started with Leslie Jensen-Inman to create industry-ready User Experience Designers. UIE is Center Centre’s professional development arm, dedicated to understanding what it takes for organizations to produce competitively great products and services. In the 43 years he’s been in the tech field, he’s worked with hundreds of organizations, written two books, published hundreds of articles and podcasts, and tours the world speaking to audiences everywhere. When he can, he does his laundry in Andover, Massachusetts.

See publication

Tags: Business Strategy, Customer Experience

Klaus Leopold on the value of Flight Levels and his book Rethinking Agile: Why Agile Teams Have Nothing To Do With Business Agility
John Coleman
October 18, 2021
The Xagility podcast has the immense pleasure of having the amazing Klaus Leopold on this week's episode. Tune in to hear Klaus talk about the beginning of his career, the start of Flight Levels and some fantastic case studies.

See publication

Tags: Agile

Reviewing Cynefin - weaving sense making into the fabric of our world with Dave Snowden
John Coleman
October 05, 2021
This week, the Xagility podcast has the pleasure of hosting Dave Snowden to discuss his latest book, Cynefin weaving sense-making into the fabric of our world publication in 2020.

Sit back, relax and enjoy.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLAyXnUx_TU

Check out Dave's book here: https://www.cognitive-edge.com/cynefinbook/


See publication

Tags: Agile

John Coleman of Orderly Disruption meets Pia-Maria Thoren of Agile People
Xagility Podcast™
July 20, 2021
Xagility is a podcast series for the curious c-suite.

In this Xagility podcast episode, John Coleman of Orderly Disruption meets Pia-Maria Thorén of Agile People to review the book "Agile People".

John and Pia-Maria discuss metaphorical gardening, invitation over imposition, motivation, inspiration, agile leadership, agile management, and a beautiful poem by Dr. Leandro Herrero.

https://linktr.ee/johncolemanagile

See publication

Tags: Agile, HR, Leadership

The theory of Scrum team effectiveness and evidence supporting it with Christiaan Verwijs and Dr Daniel Russo
Sustainable Xagility™
July 12, 2021
Have you ever wondered what makes Scrum teams effective? Perhaps you have found some theories online but do any of them have any scientific evidence? We bet not.

This episode brings you 5 years worth of research by the extremely knowledgeable Christiaan Verwijs and Dr Daniel Russo. Throughout the last half decade, these two have embarked on a journey to shed more light on what it is exactly that makes scrum teams effective whilst also debunking some of the common myths and thought patterns.

Having a scientifically backed answer not only adds to the field of scrum but also brings certainty - guidelines for effectiveness.

See publication

Tags: Management, Leadership, Agile

Robert Kinnerfelt chats with John Coleman about Holacracy and Sociocracy (Teaser)
Sustainable Xagility™
June 30, 2021
Ever wondered what the terms "Holacracy" and "Sociocracy" mean in the context of agile? How do we define and implement them? What is their effect?

Well wonder no more, Robert Kinnerfelt joins this week's Xagility episode to provide you all the answers. Alongside the host, John Coleman, both speakers dive in the ins and outs of Holacracy and Sociocracy and how they impact organisations.

Put your headphones on, the show is about to begin.

See publication

Tags: Leadership, Agile

Walking through Empowered with Marty Cagan
Sustainable Xagility™
June 23, 2021
This week, Xagility has the immense pleasure of hosting the incredible Marty Cagan to discuss his fantastic book: "Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products".
Marty Cagan is the author of Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, and Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products. He has performed and managed virtually all of the roles in a modern software product organization, including product management, software development, product marketing, user experience design, software testing, engineering management, and executive management. He is the founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group, where he helps others create successful products through his writing, speaking, advising, and coaching. Marty has served as an executive responsible for defining and building products for some of the most successful companies in the world, including Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, and eBay.
Packed with anecdotes, humor as well as pure wisdom, this episode is guaranteed to inspire you (pun intended) as the speakers dive deep into the core themes underlying Marty's book and discuss how to create tech products customers love!
So what are you waiting for? Tune in and get inspired!

See publication

Tags: Management, Leadership, Marketing, Agile

2 Professors
University of Westminster PSM classes
LinkedIn
February 07, 2022
Teaching Professional Scrum Master classes at University of Westminster.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

Teaching at University College London (4 day User Experience workshop)
LinkedIn
January 11, 2022
Delivering an in person 4 day workshop to 200+ students both physically and with the help of Ben Maynard, virtually.

See publication

Tags: Change Management, Customer Experience, Management

1 Profile
John Coleman profile on LeadersHum
LeadersHum.com
October 13, 2022
An agility chef at Orderly Disruption, the creator of Xagility and Kanplexity, and co-author of Kanban Guide. Co-creates a sustainable environment for agility. John specializes in executive agility to unlock organizational agility. Practices agility in tech and non-tech, and wrote Kanplexity for domains beyond software. A Prokanban.org Professional Kanban trainer (PKT), Scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer (PST), LeSS Friendly Scrum Trainer (LSFT) who practices most of the time. Also into product management, Cynefin, Flight Levels, LeSS, Nexus, and UX.

See publication

Tags: Leadership, Agile, Change Management

3 Speaking Engagements
ProductTank Malaga 2022
You Tube
October 06, 2022
Hit Delete: unlocking executive behavior to unlock organizational agility

Let’s explore the unintended consequences of expecting teams to be agile when we haven’t cultivated the right environment. Instead of buying “agility in a box,” what can we do to foster the growth of authentic, sustainable organizational agility? Part of the answer might be in improving executive agility. Glacial evolution at the executive level often results in people giving up hope on the dream of organizational agility, even those initially enthusiastic about it. There are agility frameworks tailored for teams, teams of teams, managers, leaders, finance, and people operations.This talk focuses on executives in tech and non-tech environments and the people supporting them. We look at how deleting specific executive behaviors could avoid the feeling that agility is just about teams. Perhaps we can attain executive agility by deleting unhelpful behaviors one at a time. We don’t have a proven recipe, but maybe we can strive to have fewer “agile-gone-wrong stories” by better understanding the urgency required for these deletions.In this discussion, we explore:

The observable executive behaviors that might indicate what to address first.

Actionable steps towards deleting the above behaviors.
Being aware of the side effects of starting elsewhere.
Real-life examples of the impact deleting certain behaviors had on organizational agility.
Where you can begin to affect change.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

John Coleman: Hit Delete - unlocking executive agility one deletion at a time
Youtube
March 01, 2022
#AgileWithUkraine #10 John Coleman: Hit Delete - unlocking executive #agility one deletion at a time

John Coleman is a top 10 thought leader for agility at Thinkers 360, a scrum.org Professional Scrum Trainer, a prokanban.org Professional Kanban Trainer, a LeSS Friendly Scrum Trainer, a podcaster (Xagility for curious executives, Daily Flow for agility practitioners), a practitioner, and prolific blogger.

About talk:
Let's explore the unintended consequences of expecting teams to be agile when we haven't cultivated the right environment. Instead of buying "agility in a box," what can we do to foster the growth of authentic, sustainable organizational agility? Part of the answer might be in improving executive agility. Glacial evolution at the executive level often results in people giving up hope on the dream of organizational agility, even those initially enthusiastic about it. There are agility frameworks tailored for teams, teams of teams, managers, leaders, finance, and people operations. This talk will focus on executives in tech and non-tech environments and the people supporting them. Let's look at how deleting specific executive behaviors could avoid the feeling that agility is just about teams. Perhaps we can attain executive agility by deleting unhelpful behaviors one at a time. We don't have a proven recipe, but maybe we can strive to have fewer "agile-gone-wrong stories" by better understanding the urgency required for these deletions? In this discussion, we'll explore: The observable executive behaviors that might indicate what to address first. Actionable steps towards deleting the above behaviors. Being aware of side effects from starting elsewhere. Real-life examples about the impact deleting certain behaviors had on organizational agility. Where you can begin to affect change.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Hit Delete
John Coleman agility chef
November 11, 2021
Supports for authentic sustainable organisational agility.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management

1 Trademark
Author of Kanplexity
EUIPO
June 15, 2021
John has coined the term 'Kanplexity' and it is trademarked.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

5 Trainings
ProKanban.org Applying Professional Kanban
John Coleman
May 07, 2022
Kanban is fast becoming the modern way to manage an organization’s delivery of customer value. In today’s always-on environment, you need a clear set of practices that don’t get in the way of your ability to continuously deliver but that provides enough structure to keep everyone aligned and focused. This 2 day course will give you an in-depth introduction to improving your team’s effectiveness by applying Kanban flow principles.

In this class, you will learn the basic principles of flow and how to use them to make your team process more efficient, predictable, and effective.

With an emphasis on the practical application of concepts, this course includes many hands-on exercises that will lead you through the steps of setting up and operating a Kanban system for continuous value delivery and improvement.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy

Professional Scrum with Kanban
John Coleman
April 25, 2022
Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK) is an interactive, activity-based training course that teaches experienced Scrum Masters and other Scrum practitioners how to improve the way they work by applying Kanban practices in the context of Professional Scrum. Through theory, case studies and hands-on exercises, students will learn how Kanban practices can help Scrum Teams achieve better outcomes by improving the flow of work. Organizations using DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) will find adding flow to their application of Scrum to be a natural complement.

The course also includes a free attempt at the globally recognized Professional Scrum with Kanban (PSK I) certification exam.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy

Scaled Professional Scrum (SPS)
John Coleman
March 28, 2022
Scaled Professional Scrum (SPS) with Nexus is a 4-day course that is designed as an experiential workshop where students learn how to scale Scrum using the Nexus Framework. Throughout, you are introduced to the artifacts and events within the framework, the new Nexus Integration Team role, along with more than 50 associated practices. The course also includes a free attempt at the globally recognized Scaled Professional Scrum certification exam.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy

Professional Scrum with User Experience (PSU)
John Coleman
March 14, 2022
Professional Scrum with User Experience (PSU) is a hands-on, activity based course where students experience how Scrum and User Experience (UX) align and integrate to create cross-functional teams that connect more closely with end users and customers, ultimately delivering more value and improving outcomes. By working together in a dual-track agile process, members of the Scrum Team can work more effectively to balance discovery work and delivery work.

The course also includes a free attempt at the globally recognized Professional Scrum with User Experience I certification assessment (PSU I).

See publication

Tags: Agile

Professional Agile Leadership - Essentials (PAL-E)
John Coleman
February 19, 2022
The Professional Agile Leadership Essentials (PAL-E) is a 2-day hands-on workshop that uses a combination of instruction and hands-on exercises to help managers and other leaders who work directly with agile teams understand how to best support, guide, and coach their teams to improve their agile capabilities.

The workshop provides a foundation for the role that leaders play in creating the conditions for a successful agile transformation. Leaders and managers are critical enablers in helping their organizations be successful, yet the role of leaders and managers in an agile organization can be quite different from what they are used to.

This workshop uses a combination of instruction and team-based exercises to help participants learn how to form and support agile teams to achieve better results, and how to lead the cultural and behavioural changes that organizations must make to reap the benefits of an agile product delivery approach.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management

137 Videos
How is Kanplexity different to simply adopting Kanban as a stand alone framework?
Youtube
February 10, 2023
#kanplexity #productdevelopment #projectmanagement

#kanplexity is an alternative approach to #productdevelopment and #projectmanagement developed by John Coleman - X Agility - with the purpose of helping #executive and #leadership teams increase #organizationalagility and competitive advantage.

The model uses #kanban as an #agileframework but isn't based exclusively on kanban, as many organizations do use it as a standalone approach.

#kanplexity combines the best of #projectmanagement, #agile #productdevelopment practices, and #kanban to help teams navigate complexity and focus on building the most valuable products, in the most valuable way, at the most valuable time for both customers and the organization.

In this short video, John Coleman explains the difference between #kanplexity and simply adopting #kanban as an #agileframework for your #productdevelopment.

#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

What outcomes could executives expect after 90 days of the X Agility engagement model?
Youtube
February 08, 2023
#agile #scrum #leadership

One of the more frustrating elements of #agile for #leadership and #executive teams is the truth that teams simply cannot know the unknowable upfront, nor can they declare with certainty when a solution will be created and how much that will cost.

That's the problem with complexity. It is filled with volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity.

That said, there are proven ways to navigate complexity effectively and ensure that teams work on the most valuable solutions or solve the most compelling problems.

So, if you do engage with X Agility and opt for the #agile coaching or consulting service to help you figure out how to move forward effectively, what could you reasonably expect after 90 days of the engagement model?

In this short video, John Coleman explains how the X Agility engagement model works and what you could expect within 30, 60, and 90 days of starting.

#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

How will the PSU course help leadership teams innovate?
Youtube
February 07, 2023
#agile #scrum #leadership

Transitioning from a traditional #projectmanagement and #management approach to #agile can be incredibly tough for #leadership and #executive teams.

Going from a rigid, step-by-step model for building solutions to a lightweight #agileframework based on values and principles can be daunting because the familiar and trusted guardrails aren't present. Nobody is telling you what to do, how to do it, and when to do it because the solution has never been created before, nor has the problem ever been solved before.

In short, we don't know what we don't know and need to discover the best way forward through experimentation, frequent inspection, and adaptation.

Empirical Process Control.

So, how do you decide which products are worth building and which are best discarded? How do you know whether your teams are working on the most valuable solution or solving the most compelling problems in a way that leads to increased market share, revenue, and opportunities for the organization to thrive?

In this short video, John Coleman explains how the PSU (Professional Scrum with User Experience) course from scrum.org can help #leadership and #executive teams innovate and navigate complexity effectively.

#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

How have leadership requirements evolved because of complexity?
Youtube
February 06, 2023
#agile #scrum #projectmanagement

For decades, traditional #projectmanagement and #management practices successfully delivered products and services that the world loved. From the Model T Ford to the stunning bridges we use to cross rivers and valleys.

Given it's past success, why would something like #agile have been developed, and why would organizations transition from a tried and tested methodology to harness the power of this new approach?

In a word, complexity.

If you've never built a solution or solved a problem before, and you can't know all the variables that will impact your ability to create the solution, traditional #projectmanagement, and #micromanagement simply won't do the trick. It isn't designed for complexity and uncertainty.

As the world has become more complex, the need for new approaches to #productdevelopment and #innovation has arisen, but with that has come to the need for #leadership and #executive teams to evolve too.

In this short video, John Coleman explains how leadership requirements have evolved because of complexity and why it's critical that #agileleadership is present.


#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

How important is executive agility in the Kanplexity model?
Youtube
February 03, 2023
#kanplexity #projectmanagement #productdevelopment

#kanplexity is an alternative approach to #projectmanagement and #productdevelopment, developed by John Coleman, to help organizations increase their #agile capabilities and become more effective in delivering products and services that truly delight customers.

It can be tempting to think that a new style of working, at the team level, combined with an #agileframework like #kanban means that #leadership teams and #executives don't need to be involved, but it isn't that simple.

In this short video, John Coleman explains why #executiveagility and #agileleadership is important in the #kanplexity model and how it helps teams become more effective, collaborative, and creative.


#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

How does Kanplexity help leaders navigate complexity?
Youtube
February 02, 2023
#agile #scrum #projectmanagement

Many organizations have succeeded with traditional #projectmanagement and #management approaches, especially in simple and complicated environments, but are now exploring alternative approaches to help them deal with increasing degrees of complexity and uncertainty.

#kanplexity was developed by John Coleman as an alternative approach to #projectmanagement and #productdevelopment that allowed #leadership teams and #projectmanagers to navigate complexity and improve the flow of work throughout the organization.

It also helps grow #agile capabilities and empowers the organization to become increasingly adaptive and responsive to customer needs and competitor disruption.

In this short video, John Coleman explains how #kanplexity helps #leadership teams navigate complexity effectively.

#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Is there a place for project managers in Kanplexity?
Youtube
February 01, 2023
#kanplexity #projectmanagement #productdevelopment
#kanplexity is an alternative approach to #projectmanagement and #productdevelopment, developed by

John Coleman, to help teams become more #agile and align their efforts with the customer and organizational objectives.

In the #agile and #scrum world, #projectmanagers are often given a hard time by the community and told that there is no place for them in the new world of #productdevelopment.

It seems ridiculous because #projectmanagers have such great skills, deep experience in delivering great work, and transferable competencies and capabilities that would be invaluable in #productdevelopment.

In this short video, John Coleman explains why #kanplexity definitely has a place for #projectmanagers and what subtle changes they would need to make to succeed with the model.


#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Can agile and waterfall project management co exist?
Youtube
January 31, 2023
#softwareengineers #agilemanifesto #agile

In 2001, a group of brilliant #softwareengineers came together to define the #agilemanifesto and create a new style of work that focused on values and principles rather than predetermined steps to help them navigate complexity and build products that delight customers.

It has proven incredibly successful, and as more organizations embrace the opportunity of #agile to help them navigate complexity, the number of organizations who attempt to adopt #agile for their #productdevelopment in tandem with #projectmanagement for their #projects has increased.

It's a difficult environment to navigate and often creates tension between traditional #projectmanagers and #agileleadership teams. In this short video, John Coleman explores whether #agile and co-exist with traditional #projectmanagement in the same organization.


#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

What is Agile Leadership and why is it important?
Youtube
January 30, 2023
#projectmanagement #leadership #projectmanager

In a traditional #projectmanagement environment, we often deal with a series of predetermined steps. We know exactly what needs to be done, who needs to do the work, and within what cost and time constraints need to happen.

Management of the environment works great. Although #leadership is important, teams can typically get by with a strong # project manager supported by senior managers who authorize resources and make ad-hoc decisions.

In a complex environment, where we don't know the answer up front and must discover and learn to continuously improve and develop a solution, #agileleadership becomes incredibly important.

In this short video, John Coleman explains what #agileleadership is and why it is incredibly important for #agile teams and teams of teams.

#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Does Kanplexity work at scale?
Youtube
January 27, 2023
#kanplexity #projectmanagement #productdevelopment

#kanplexity is an alternative approach to #projectmanagement and #productdevelopment, developed by John Coleman, combining the best #agile, traditional #projectmanagement, and #kanban.

It's designed to help teams focus on delivering the most valuable work to customers in alignment with organizational capabilities and objectives.

One of our most frequently asked questions is whether #kanplexity can work at scale? Can this approach integrate teams of #agileteams or does it, like #scrum, only work with a standalone team?

In this short video, John Coleman explains how #kanplexity works at scale and why it's a great way to build products and solve complex problems.

#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexit

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

What are the 3 primary challenges of project management that Kanplexity solves?
Youtube
January 26, 2023
#projectmanagement #agile #productdevelopment

Over the past 20 years, a debate has ranged between the #projectmanagement and #agile communities about which approach works best in #productdevelopment and complex environments.

The #agile purists would have you believe that #agile is the answer to every problem, whilst the #projectmanagement purists would have you believe that a few tweaks to the PMI program or PRINCE framework will help you navigate complexity.

John Coleman has worked in both camps for decades and developed a model known as #kanplexity to help traditional #projectmanagement teams navigate complexity and grow their #agile capabilities.

In this short video, he explains how #kanplexity solves the three primary challenges of #projectmanagement and empowers teams to build products and services that truly delight customers.


#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Why is a direction of travel preferable to a fixed strategy?
Youtube
January 25, 2023
#agile #leadership #executive

In simple or complicated environments, we have the luxury of determining a fixed strategy to navigate the future because we understand the environment, know all of the variables, and have a fair degree of confidence that best practices will lead to desired outcomes and objectives.

If you are building a road, this is the best way to build it, these are the best people to build it, and the following three factors will determine how successful we are in the future of our roadbuilding mission.

In complex environments, we don't know the answers upfront, nor have we ever solved the problems that lay before us, so we can't set a fixed strategy because it may well prove useless a few short months after we start.

So, how do #agile #leadership teams determine the best way forward in the face of extreme uncertainty and complexity? How do they set goals and objectives and create a vision for the future that inspires others?

In this short video, John Coleman explains why a 'direction of travel' is preferable to a fixed strategy for #executive and #leadership teams.


#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

What is the primary responsibility of a leader and why is that so important?
Youtube
January 24, 2023
#projectmanagement #traditional #management

In traditional organizations, #projectmanagement has thrived in simple or complicated applications such as civil engineering. In other words, when we know the answer upfront, and we know how best to build that bridge and who is best suited to build the bridge, #projectmanagement is a great tool.

In complex environments, where we don't know the answer upfront, nor are we even sure that we can solve the problem, #traditional #projectmanagement falls over. A new style of work is required to navigate complexity and uncertainty.

It's true of leadership too. In the good old days, we simply had to manage things well rather than discover and innovate, so traditional #management styles worked a treat. What happens when you need to shift from efficient to effective? What happens when you need to shift from execution to innovation?

In this short video, John Coleman explains the primary responsibility of a leader in a complex environment and why that is so important in the 21st Century.


#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Why does Kanban work better for teams using Kanplexity than traditional project management software?
Youtube
January 23, 2023
#kanplexity #projectmanagement #productdevelopment

#kanplexity is an alternative approach to #projectmanagement and #productdevelopment, developed by John Coleman, to help organizations navigate increasing complexity in the 21st century.

In short, the old style of #projectmanagement simply falls over when confronted with complexity and disruption.

So, why has John looked to #kanban as a framework to help #projectmanagers and #leadership teams navigate complexity? Why not simply stick with traditional #projectmanagement tools and software?

In this short video, John Coleman explains how #kanplexity helps teams navigate complexity and why #kanban plays such an integral role in the model.


#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

How is agile training different from project management training?
Youtube
January 20, 2023
#projectmanagement #agile #agileframeworks
When you've worked your whole career in a traditional #projectmanagement environment and tend to think about projects rather than products and initiatives, it can be incredibly difficult to navigate complexity.

Where #projectmanagement prescribes specific steps and has heaps of checks and balances in place to provide the illusion of control and security, #agile instead focuses on values and principles, supported by lightweight #agileframeworks to guide #leadership teams through complexity.

What does that mean in reality? How does #agile translate into a better approach to #productdevelopment in complex environments?

In this short video, John Coleman walks us through the difference between #agile training and #projectmanagement training.


#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

What is the first step for an agile leader when confronted with disruption?
Youtube
January 19, 2023
#leadership #projectmanagement #agileframework
You're a member of the #leadership team, and you're either working with traditional #projectmanagement frameworks or an #agileframework to build products, solve problems, and navigate complex marketplaces.

What do you do when you're confronted with disruption? What is the first thing you should do when it's clear that the threat is present to your customers, your organization, and the markets you serve?

In this short video, John Coleman talks about how #agileleadership teams can respond to initial disruption and what steps they can take to navigate out of quicksand and back onto solid ground.

#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

How has agile evolved, in your opinion, since 2001?
Youtube
January 18, 2023
#scrum #agile #empiricism
#scrum and #agile are built on empirical process control, also known as #empiricism, which consists of 3 primary pillars.

Transparency. Inspection. Adaptation.

We do our work and thinking visible, frequently inspect what we have done, and use the data and evidence to inform what we do next. Adapt.

The goal? Continuous improvement and learning.

So, how has #agile evolved since its formal inception in 2001? How has the philosophy and industry evolved, based on everything that has been learned in the past 21 years, and where will it lead next?

In this short video, John Coleman provides some insights into how #agile has evolved and where he imagines it will go next.
#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

What are 3 great reasons for an executive to trust an agile coach?
Youtube
January 17, 2023
#projectmanagement #agile #productdevelopment
Over many decades, many organizations have become successful by following traditional #projectmanagement approaches that have been refined over time. #projectmanagement works great in a simple or complicated environment but tends to fall over in complex environments, which is why so many organizations have begun to explore the opportunity of #agile.

Making a shift from a #projectmanagement mindset to a culture of innovation and #productdevelopment can be incredibly difficult. As such, many #leadership teams and executives turn to an #agilecoach or #agileconsultant for help.

So, what should you look for in an #agilecoach, and why should you and your #leadership team trust them? In this short video, John Coleman explains why executives can trust an #agilecoach and what they should be looking to extract from the partnership.

If you are looking for an agile consultant to help your leadership team identify an appropriate roadmap to organizational agility and take the most effective course of action in your agile transformation, visit our consulting page at https://x-agility.com/executive-agili...

#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Why is a strong product ownership stance important for agile leaders?
Youtube
January 16, 2023
#scrum #productowner #scrumteam
In #scrum, the #productowner acts like the CEO of the product. Essentially, they help shape and articulate a strong vision for the product that inspires the #scrumteam to dig deeper, work smarter, and think more creatively about the solutions they build.

It's an accountability rather than a job title, and it's an incredibly valuable stance for #agileleadership teams to have when making the shift from #projectmanagement to #productdevelopment.

In this short video, John Coleman talks about the value of a strong product ownership stance and why it is incredibly important for #agile leaders.

About John Coleman

John Coleman has deep experience and expertise working with executives, #leadership teams and product development teams to achieve increased #organizationalagility and create environments where creativity and collaboration produce high-performance teams.

https://linktr.ee/johncolemanxagility - social and podcast links
https://linkpop.com/orderlydisruption - order training from right here

If you are interested in helping your team or organization achieve greater agility and want to explore agile training options, visit our training page on https://x-agility.com/executive-agili....

If you value coaching and would like to work with a deeply experienced agile and executive coaching specialist, visit our coaching page on https://x-agility.com/executive-agili...

If you are looking for an agile consultant that can help your leadership team identify an appropriate roadmap to organizational agility and take the most effective course of action in your agile transformation, visit our consulting page on https://x-agility.com/executive-agili...

#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrumorg #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Product owner coping strategies
Youtube
December 12, 2022
Are you a product owner?
Here are some tried and tested product owner coping strategies!
1. Become a developer - 1:33
2. 'Speak now or forever hold your silence' meeting - 2:19

Enjoyed this episode? Or perhaps you may have a question? Let's connect on

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncolem...
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/johncoleman...

#scrum #agility #productowner #copingstrategies #productmanagement #productmanager #agile #stakeholdermanagement

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Who owns the change?
Youtube
November 29, 2022
Successful organizations have evolved over years, sometimes decades, into the efficient and profitable companies they are. The behaviors, practices, and systems that facilitated that success are deeply entrenched and it can be very hard for those organizations to pivot or change.

So, for the organizations that do embrace #agility and embark on an #agiletransformation, what does change look like and who owns that change?

Is this something that happens to the organization or something which is cultivated and nurtured from within?

In this short video, John Coleman talks about the value of change and addresses the topic of 'who owns the change' in the organization.
#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrum.org #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

How much of a risk do traditional managers face if they don't embrace agility?
Youtube
November 28, 2022
Every element of change offers an opportunity and delivers a potential threat. If we do this, we may gain X but we might lose Y.

It is equally important to consider the risk of not doing something to fully understand whether you have exposure, and what that exposure might cost in the long-term.

Since the creation of the #agilemanifesto in 2001, a lot of companies have adopted a 'wait and see' approach. They have witnessed #agile grow in popularity and deliver outstanding results, and they have also witnessed the failed #agiletransformation of several large organizations.

In a simple or complicated environment there is no urgency to adopt #agile because traditional #projectmanagement works just fine, and executive and leadership teams straddle the fine line between efficiency and effectiveness.

In a complex environment, a great deal changes and organizations are open to disruption from multiple avenues. So, how much of a risk do traditional managers face if they don't embrace #agility? What are the consequences of doing things the way we have always done them around here?

In this short video, John Coleman talks about risk and potential repercussions for traditional managers and organizations.

#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrum.org #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Are agile executives born or do they need training and coaching?
Youtube
November 25, 2022
There is an interesting TED Talk from Sir Ken Robinson where he talks about the percentage of creative genius identified in young kids, before they attend school, and how that rapidly diminishes as people move through the education system.

School environments tend to reward the same things that traditional managers and organizations reward. Obedience. Diligence. Compliance.

So, in a world of great complexity where we now value creativity, collaboration, and innovation, how many #executives and #leaders possess the innate creative genius, agility, and collaborative skills necessary to cultivate and nurture effective #agile teams?

Are these people born or can they get there through #coaching, #training, and #mentoring? In this short video, John Coleman speaks about his experience with #executiveagility and what he has observed.

#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrum.org #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

How much of an impact can an agile executive have on the team environment?
Youtube
November 24, 2022
You will often hear #agile practitioners and #agilecoaches talk about the need for #leadership and #executive teams to actively champion #agile rather than simply support the idea of it.

Yes, adopting #agile and working with small teams can have a significant impact on the quality of #productdevelopment as well as increase the velocity of delivery, but there are things that are beyond the influence and control of the team and they do need help from powerful executives.

So, how much of an impact can a great #agileleadership team or #agile executive have on the team environment? How much does it really matter whether executives embrace #agile or not?

In this short video, John Coleman speaks about the significance of #executiveagility and how it can impact the team environment.
#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrum.org #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

What attracted you to executive agility and why do you think such a great need for it exists?
Youtube
November 23, 2022
n the world of #agile and #productdevelopment, there are a great deal of #agileframeworks, tools, models, and so forth that are designed to help individuals and teams increase #agility.

There are also a significant number of thought leaders, courses, and articles that help guide #agile practitioners through the process of #productdevelopment and #productmanagement, but there aren't many resources for #agileleadership teams and an aspiring #agileleader.

In this short video, John Coleman talks about the thing that first attracted him to the #executiveagility space, and why he feels that #executiveagility is one of the most valuable skills an organization can cultivate and nurture.
#agile #leadership #agileleadership #certifiedagileleadership #professionalagileleadership #scrum #scrum.org #xagility #executiveagility #xagility #execagility #executiveagile #kanplexity

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

2 Visiting Lecturers
Teaching Scrum.org Professional Scrum Master I for University of Westminster
University of Westminster
February 20, 2022

See publication

Tags: Emerging Technology, Culture, Agile

Lean UX at scale at UCL
University College London
January 10, 2022
--over 200 undergraduates, some on Zoom, some in the room, in a hybrid 4-day event
--visit from Dave Snowden
--co-hosted with Ben Maynard and some wonderful teaching assistants

See publication

Tags: Agile, Culture, Design Thinking

2 Webinars
Launch event - Kanplexity - an expansion pack for Kanban
You Tube
October 03, 2022
Here is a snippet...

"Background

Organizational agility suits our present-day world because of the prevalence of complex work. On the way to achieving agility, we face many hazards. Given a plethora of choices, we can experience analysis paralysis. If we lack trust when working in a complex environment, we can end up experiencing unhealthy conflict. If we fall into a pattern of groupthink, a drift into disaster becomes more likely. We need to find a way to work together and be open to fresh perspectives from non-experts and experts from different fields of work. We need experiments to settle debates or discover the best ideas for now.

Agile was created to advance software development and is based on the values and principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, now known as the Agile Manifesto. Lean and many of its 21st-century variants also have underpinning principles. Before applying any of these concepts, it’s crucial to understand the culture, context, subject matter, and situation because we often need to make adaptations to fit.

Most people find it difficult to operate purely from values and principles. It can be helpful to put scaffolding in place to ease the path. The type of scaffolding we might need depends on our situation. Context-free recipes don’t work well in the complex domain.

Why Kanplexity?

Agile has its origins in the Manifesto for Software Development. What we lack is guidance for potential agilists in other sectors. Using tenets of Kanban and Cynefin sense-making, Kanplexity offers an optional approach to those in non-software settings.

Kanplexity attempts to strike a balance between the competing forces of doing the right thing, the right way, quickly, (more) predictably, repeatedly, and sustainably.



Kanban and complexity

As Kanplexity is an expansion pack for Kanban, Kanplexity does not describe Kanban. Kanban is already described in Kanban Guide. According to Kanban Guide, Kanban is a strategy to optimize the flow of value through a process (an accessible pull-based system). The Kanban Guide helps people deal with complex problems by optimizing signaling. As long as the approach abides by key tenets of the Kanban Guide, you can use any Kanban or flow approach and still benefit from Kanplexity.

Cynefin is described in Cynefin. Cynefin followers argue that Kanban alone does not sufficiently deal with complex work. However, we can benefit from the synergy created by using Kanban in tandem with Cynefin. Kanplexity is a jumping-off point for supporting Cynefin via Kanban."

Kanplexity Orderly Disruption Limited 2019-2022, CC-BY-SA

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Leadership

Lithe Talk: Hit Delete
Lithe Transformation
January 11, 2022
John was invited to give his 'Hit Delete' Talk at Lithe Talk.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Design Thinking

1 Whitepaper
Co-Author of the Kanban Guide
Website
December 01, 2020
John has co-authored the Kanban Guide along with Daniel Vacanti.

See publication

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Open Innovation

Thinkers360 Credentials

12 Badges

Blog

27 Article/Blogs
How to manage discovery and delivery work on a Kanban board?
Thinkers360
January 16, 2024
 

 

On a Kanban board, you have

  • a definition of workflow,
  • a start point,
  • a finish point,
  • a cycle time (how long does the work take to get from the start point to the finish point),
  • throughput (what is the rate of items being delivered across the finish point per time period, e.g. per day, per week, per sprint),
  • work item age (what is the elapsed time from which a work item has started, but has still not yet finished),
  • Work-In-Progress (WIP) (all the items that are within the starting point and the finish point).

Types of Work on a Kanban board

You could argue, on a Kanban board we have:

  • discovery work;
  • development work; and
  • delivery work.

Discovery Work

Discovery work would be, for example, research to figure out whether this is the right thing to build for the customer. Maybe we are doing some experiments or some prototyping. It is very wise to do experiments when we have insufficient evidence so we can harvest the proposed value because at the end of the day, our work items are bets at best. They are ill-informed opinions at worst if you do not experiment. You could just fill your funnel with stuff to develop and maybe there is no evidence you should actually develop it. So discovery is about discovering value, it is about learning.

Development Work

Development is about building the product, making the product.

Delivery Work

Delivery is about getting that work that we have made and giving it to the customer.

The 4 Time Horizons You need to think about on your Kanban Board

You could argue there are four time horizons.

  1. Discovering the “next best thing”.
  2. Developing what we now have evidence is the right thing to do.
  3. Delivering the stuff that we have got to a stage that is ready for a customer to consume.
  4. Looking back at those previous releases that we had, those deployments that we had to the markets, did they actually make a difference? Did we change customer behaviors? Do we reap some organizational value? Do we improve our reputation as an organization? Do we improve employee satisfaction? Do we reduce our plastic footprint? Do we reduce our carbon footprint? And so on.

The question is…what do you do with this work?

Kanban vs Scrum: the approach to the backlog

In Kanban, the backlog is optional. Unlike in Scrum, where there is a product backlog, which is mandatory, it is an artifact.

In Kanban, the backlog is optional. You can also have a funnel, which is like the backlog for a backlog. This is another optional container that you might have on your definition of workflow.

Managing the Time Horizons

There are multiple patterns available for managing these four time horizons. The thing is that we are managing WHAT type of work it is as opposed to WHO is doing the work.

In a modern team that is trying to practice agility, I would hope that people are trying to learn other skills. The reality is that the people who do discovery have a lot of work to do and there are usually fewer people who have the skill to do that discovery. What I often find is the people who do discovery are often coaching, mentoring, teaching, and willing volunteers who want to learn how to do that discovery.

For example, someone doing development might be invited to a customer interview to just take notes and gain an appreciation of what the customer/ end-user wants.

Another example is a developer who might be asked to do some low-fidelity prototyping. Perhaps maybe even practice their skills doing customer interviews because we need to be careful: either avoid loaded questions or as Indy Young would say, maybe just do some deep listening. Listening to where the customer wants to go with the conversation.

John Carter (the inventor of the BOSE noise canceling headphones) said in the test shop that they had in BOSE, when they had people come into the music store they were purely just observing where the customer goes, not pointing them to new innovation. They were just seeing if they pick it up, what they do with it, what did they discover. Lo and behold, instead of discovering that customers wanted to improve the sound fidelity, they liked the whole idea of noise cancellation. Noise canceling headphones were discovered by accident, through an accident of innovation.

So we are trying to have as many innovation accidents as possible, because in reality that is where most innovation comes from (and also through twisting previous inventions for a new purpose).

Discovery is never finished: How do we navigate this?

The challenge is that there is so much of that discovery work and discovery is never finished because the people who do discovery also were involved in doing usability testing as the work is going through development, for example. They also analyze what is going on after the work has been released to the market to see how people are interacting and what or where they are dropping out. So maybe helping product managers to look at the customer analytics and understand what is going on.

In a dynamic trio, for example:

  • a technical person;
  • a design person; and
  • a product manager

could get together to talk about, okay, what do we understand we need to do here? What do we need to discover next? What do we need to deliver next?

So how do you manage all of this?

You could have, for example, columns for:

  • discovery;
  • development;
  • delivery;
  • getting feedback.

“Measure and Tweak” is a column name that I quite like.

The thing is that not every item that goes through discovery will go through development because we will probably discover that most of the items should not be built.

We know, for example, from several editions of the Chaos Report from the Standish Group that two-thirds of what we build is never/rarely used. So we want to discover as much of that as possible before we build something. If not, we are just filling the development funnel and the delivery funnel with work that might not be valuable.

Another pattern that I have seen is, instead of having columns for those stages (which assumes that there a sequential process), maybe having swim lanes for those. This is because some work might go back from development into discovery, and some might go from measure and tweak back into discovery.

REMEMBER: On a Kanban board, we do not want work items moving backwards.

The use of swim lanes can avoid that problem.

Using good heat map reporting, you would be able to see where the work is spending most of its time.

Split work-items

In terms of work items, I tend to separate discovery work items from development work items. You could argue that development and delivery could be combined because we want to get some value.

There is value in discovery because remember, value is also about learning. So, as long as the discovery results in some learning about something being good or bad, validation of some hypothesis, meeting some people matching our personas, for example. Perhaps you are not into personas, but you have talked to some people, you have run some experiments. What did you learn?

There is value in that learning.

I have no problem with work items being there for discovery. And then there would be other work items maybe for development/delivery.

As long as each work item is valuable, that is fine.

So I talked about split items, and now I will be talking about combined.

Combined work-items

You could also have work items that have all:

  • the discovery work;
  • the development work; and
  • the delivery work on the same item.

With subtasks for the individual discovery, development, and delivery tasks, for example.

Each of those subtasks in themselves contributes to the delivery of value, but in and of themselves are not valuable. So the entire work item itself is valuable.

The problem that I see with that approach is that it leads to what I refer to as execution bias, where there is almost a kind of path of least resistance to continue to develop and deliver, even though we might not have evidence that we are on the right track. So we want to visualize as many signals as possible. We want to see what options we have. That maybe is building up some evidence that we should develop and deliver them.

We want to see what is going on in development and delivery. We want to also see what are we measuring and tweaking and what are we learning. So we are getting that learning cycle, that empirical loop of deciding what to do next based on what we learned last.

Often what you will discover is the outputs that we deliver to achieve outcomes are not the same as maybe what you might have expected. So it is important when you are setting goals and a direction of travel for the teams that they are outcome-oriented.

  • What change in behavior are we looking for in terms of the customer, end- user, or consumer?
  • What business value metrics, customer value metrics, or end-user value metrics are we looking to move the needle on that would demonstrate that we know we made a difference, either better or worse?

Concluding Remarks

Remember the value can be positive or negative. There are just two sets of patterns for combining discovery, development, delivery, measuring and tweaking. I would love to hear your ideas on other approaches.

The only limit is your imagination.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Lean Startup

Classes of Service in Kanban: what are they?
Thinkers360
January 11, 2024

This is my understanding of classes of service from the Kanban method.

Classes of Service

Standard/As soon as possible (ASAP)

This is normal work that needs to be done and should be done as quickly as possible.

Fixed Date Work

This is work that has to be done by a particular deadline. Deadline does not include somebody’s grandmother’s birthday or daughter’s birthday. A real deadline, not an arbitrary deadline.

A real deadline means something bad will happen on that date, ie there’s a significant increase in cost. Perhaps we get a penalty or we miss a payment opportunity. The fixed date is real.

Expedite

This is something that is really urgent. It is hurting us right now, and if we do not deal with this immediately, we could have major problems. For example, an outage with your product or service.

Intangible

This is when we have an item that maybe we do not know for sure when we are going to get this increase in cost. But there is a long-term thing that if we do not deal with it, it will bite us in the backside at some point.

Sometimes we do know the date. For example, there is a piece of software that is going to go out of support at a particular date, so it is going to cost millions to get it supported after that date if you want to pay the supplier to give special support after that date.

But more often than not, it is an unknown date when that hockey stick, increasing cost will eventually occur. It could even be as a result of shortcuts we took in the past, where the product or service is now so fragile that maybe it is in danger of collapsing at some point. So there could be some hockey stick increase in costs.

Culture eats strategy for breakfast and how to deal with urgent requests

There is a saying, “culture eats strategy for breakfast”.

While mathematically and from a flow point of view, it is a really bad idea to have different priorities for items on a definition of workflow. This is because you are giving preference to some items over others, causing some items to age more than others, eventually leading to unpredictable cycle times. These elongating cycle times eventually result in reduced throughput.

If the culture of your organization dictates that expedited items need to be dealt with urgently, maybe that is something you need to do. However, I put it to you that there is a better way of dealing with really urgent requests.

What you can simply do is… rather than having different classes of service for different types of work, if something urgent occurs, we just record a breach in our Work-In-Progress (“WIP”) limit.

Don’t increase your WIP just to account for an emergency

It is not a good idea to increase our WIP limit just to take account of an emergency because by doing that, we are actually increasing our WIP as standard.

It is better to breach your WIP limits by exception. That is the direction the Kanban Guide would be going in, where you would, instead of having special increased WIP limits, (like an expedite line for example), you would record a breach when an urgent item occurs.

I once heard a humorous way to deal with this: when someone comes to you with an urgent item, come back with two sleeping bags, and to the confused customer say, “here is your sleeping bag and this is my one”. The customer most likely will say, “what are you doing, why are you giving me a sleeping bag?”

“Well, you said this is urgent, so that is your sleeping bag and this is mine, because we’re not going home until we fix this, right?”

Ohhhhh, it’s not that urgent.

I guess what I am trying to emphasize is the point of “how urgent is that urgent request?”

Fixed Date Items: In terms of fixed date items, you could just write the fixed date on the card, so we all understand that there is a fixed date on the item.

Intangible: Why I really appreciate this class of service where the culture is about utilization of people

If there is one class of service that I appreciate, it is Intangible. This is my personal opinion.

In a context in the past where the culture was about utilization of people (of course in Kanban we do not want to keep everybody busy, we want to optimize flow, and after we optimize flow we then try to improve the utilization of our people, but in an optimized way, just in the same way we don’t want to fill the motorway with cars), what I did as a coping strategy was I asked the team to fill their board with intangible work, work that needed to be done on the long term.

This was a bit cynical of me, but it was a nice coping strategy for the team. You put in the normal work, for example, and the various priorities and so on.

The power of having intangible work on the Kanban Board

By having intangible work on the Kanban board, we are starting to work on that long-term work and so maybe in 18 months when the hockey stick increase in cost eventually might occur, perhaps we have already dealt with that.

If we do not bring in the intangible work, if people are kept utilized, it is likely that in 18 months, that intangible work could become an urgent request. The genius of actually putting intangible work on a board in a context where there is a high utilization mindset is the intangible work is the contingency, it is the slack on your board. This is because we know that if something urgent does occur, or there is a fixed date item, that we want to get those across the line perhaps.

In order to do that, we sacrifice the intangible items that are already on the board. So the intangible items will have terrible cycle times. Perhaps we can isolate the cycle times for those separately, so we can separate the signal from the noise.

We do need to be cognizant that intangible work can eventually bite us in the backside and by actually having intangible work in the system, we can ensure that it is done by that time and we will not have that emergency in 18 months.

On classes of service in general

So about classes of service in general, culture eats strategy for breakfast.

If you go to an airport and there is no first-class section for people to go through faster security, maybe there will be an uproar. From a flow point of view, it is better if everybody goes through the same security queue. For everybody, it will be faster because we have people deployed to help people with their security and the work is evenly distributed.

If you do use classes of service, the Kanban Guide does not prevent you from doing that. In fact, Kanban Guide is designed to support, well at least to not lack support for other Kanban and Flow approaches.

We were deliberate about not trying to break other approaches, so by people starting with Kanban Guide, they can, for example, upgrade to Kanban Method, hopefully, or to Tame Flow or some other Flow approach, Flow System etc.

Work item age is the most important measure

Kanban Guide does not prevent you from using classes of service, it is just from a flow point of view, work item age is the most important measure and you need to be cognizant of the impact of not managing relative work item age. Relative work item age tends to go out of control when we reprioritize items that are already in progress.

The Kanban guide view would be that you can use whatever prioritization technique to start work, including classes of service. But once the work starts, you should just finish it. Why? We do not know how valuable the item is until we have finished. You will have some trade-off decisions.

I had some teams in a large bank, for example, where they did use classes of service, but they put a ceiling on it.

There was one leader who impressed me one day.

We had:

  • expedite lane,
  • intangible,
  • fixed date,

and you can either do it by lane, or you can do it by different colors, or legends, or whatever. They happened to have lanes. The leader said “yeah, we are going to use classes of service, but we are going to put a ceiling on the work. If any item has not moved for four days, we are going to focus on that today”.

By doing this, he was combining classes of service with a ceiling on the work item age. Therefore, he was preventing work item age from going out of control. It still worsens your flow, but I thought it was a nice compromise. It is something that maybe you can consider.

Concluding Remarks

Classes of service are an option in Kanban Guide. It is just not something that is part of Kanban Guide.

It is part of what is recommended in other approaches, and you are not prevented from using it.

Thank you.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Business Strategy

How do we actively manage items in the workflow/items in progress in Kanban?
Thinkers360
January 04, 2024

 

The second practice in the Kanban Guide is actively managing items in a workflow. These items are work items.

What are work items in progress?

Work items in progress are the ones between the “started” point and the “finished” point.

Strike a balance

You can have more than one “started” point and more than one “finished point”.

But… let’s keep things simple and imagine we have a definition of workflow with:

  • 1x “started” point; and
  • 1x “finished” point.

Now, imagine there are two active columns between the “started” point and the “finished” point. There are work items in both of those columns.

Those two columns represent steps in the work and how the work gets done.

Kanban system members need to be cognizant of how we strike this balance between finishing work, monitoring work item aging, and avoiding the system from starvation.

A lot of us would dream about the system starving because most of us have problems with the work, eg, too much work in the system.

But when people are so good at finishing items and focusing on work item aging, what can sometimes happen is they forget to feed the system.

If you have two columns in your workflow and you do not feed the first column, what happens is….

  • the first column gets starved; and
  • then the second column will be starved as well; and
  • you go into at least a couple of days there where no work gets done, where we have no throughput in our system.

We need to strike a balance.

For most situations, what you are going to be looking at are two things:

  1. Do we have any blocked items in progress? → Do we have items that may be blocked but are not being marked as blocked? (which is another question). We need to look at our blocked policy (if you have a blocked policy) → what do we do when an item is blocked? Do we put a reason code on it? Do we include it in our work-in-progress limits?

In most situations, blocked items are included in the work-in-progress limit, and only in edge case situations would you have a situation where you would exclude blocked items from work-in-progress (eg, we made all the phone calls, we shook all the trees, we’re thinking of canceling one work item and so we put traffic cones around it and we allow another item in.)

That’s an edge case.

In most scenarios work-in-progress includes blocked items. So when we are actively managing the work, we are trying to unblock blocked work. That means we need to do some work to unblock. There is effort involved in unblocking items. There is no shortage of other work items that need to be done.

Often the temptation is to start another item, or to work on another item, and leave that blocked item age further and further. The problem with items aging is eventually when they get to the finish point, they would have clocked up a cycle time and we are going to have a problem. If that happens frequently i.e. if we have a pattern of elongating cycle times, eventually we could see a situation where our throughput will drop also. This could potentially mean we are reducing the number of outcomes we are getting for our customers, end-users, and the organization as well.

With blocked items, it is almost like there is a fire in the building. If something is blocked, we need to unblock it. We need to have a sense of urgency about unblocking that work because we want to finish work. In Kanban, whatever prioritization approach you might use for putting work into the workflow (moving work past the starting point, once the work has started), we want to finish the item. This is because, a lot of the items in your workflow, at the start of the workflow, are bets in essence. We do not know how valuable they are until we get some response from the customers, end-users, the market, the organization, and whoever is going to give us that feedback.

So trying to get work to the finish point as quickly as possible is essentially the objective.

2. Keep an eye on work item aging → remember, we are trying to achieve balance as well. We are trying to balance effectiveness, efficiency, and predictability. So while we want to finish items, we want to keep an eye on work item aging, and we also have to keep an eye as well on the work coming in.

If, for example, the flow of knowledge work was like the flow of water (it’s not).. but if it was, imagine if there were six liters/gallons of water going out at the end of the pipe, you would not have 2 liters of water coming in unless you were trying to bleed down the system (where there was already too much work in the system).

You would try to have some balance.

Equally, you would not have 40 liters/gallons coming in with the 6 gallons coming out the other end. So we try to achieve some balance where the system does not starve. Blocked items need to be unblocked.

Look at relatively aged items

In addition, we need to look at relatively aged items.

There are several ways you can do this.

You can put real banana skins on top of post-its and see, over several days, the banana skin going blacker and blacker because it is aging. This is a great visual way to see how an item is not getting finished. If you are in a situation where your work items last longer than a few days, even a few weeks, then you might need something better than banana skins, because those banana skins are going to look pretty awful.

Maybe we should be trying to have smaller items in a few days anyway, but leave that to another discussion.

So what we should do is look at the items that are in progress, maybe there is an item in the very first column that is the same age as an item in the second column. Remember we have two columns that are active between our “started” and our “finished” point.

Maybe they are the same if there are two items of the same age. There can be a temptation to continue the one you are working on, which is on the rightmost column that is closest to the “finished” point. To keep working on that, might be the right thing to do. However, purely from a relative aging point of view, you would be saying, “that item in the first column is the same age, but given that it is a previous step in the process, it means that it is relatively older than the item of the same age in the follow-up column”. So, a good decision there might be to focus on the one with the same age in the earlier column.

Some tools, for example, Actionable Agile does a wonderful item aging chart which is really good. It shows in different colors the relative ages of the item based on previous performance.

  • What were our cycle times before and are these items in progress?
  • How are they tracking against previous cycle times for these items?

So looking at relative item aging, looking at unblocking items, also looking at, whether there is anything else that we need to do to improve the flow.

In Kanban guide, we do not specify anything about classes of service, for example. We try not to give preferential treatment between one item and another (apart from relative item age and blocking).

Value might be a:

  • consideration; or
  • urgency; or
  • relative effort

…considering it might be a consideration further down your pull or move policy in terms of which item should you work on next.

For relative item aging, actively unblocking blocked work. If you are really looking after your flow and you want to optimize your flow, that would be a better approach for managing items in your workflow. Generally speaking, what you should do is try to get items once they have started. Try to get them finished as quickly as possible.

That might include getting them canceled as quickly as possible as well. So often I see people putting items in progress, and then they are on hold. Everybody knows they are on hold, and nobody is brave enough to just cancel them, because actually, we know we are not going to finish this work.

So let us be transparent about it and just cancel the work. Get to “finished”.

You can mark it as canceled so it does not throw up a false throughput number. You can filter out the items that are canceled from your throughput number.

What we do not want is items moving backward unless we have decided, we should never have started this item in the first place. What were we thinking in bringing this item in? It should go back to the very, very start of the board.

That is my knowledge of active management of work in progress.

Thank you.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Lean Startup

Hypotheses — what are they? Why are they important in Xagility?
Thinkers360
December 21, 2023

 

I talk a lot about hypotheses, but what is a hypothesis?

What is a hypothesis?

It is essentially re-wording an assumption or set of assumptions in a way that is put more like a question, or something that needs to be tested, eg. we believe this particular set of assumptions to be true, and we will know if we are right if X happens.

With hypotheses, it is important that you decide how you are going to measure whether the hypothesis is valid or invalid.

We do not want to be just trying things. That is kind of like what we call “whack-a-mole” where you are whacking the moles in the funfair and just reacting. In that context, you are not thinking systemically.

What should you consider when you have a hypothesis?

We want you to be considerate when you have a hypothesis:

  • what assumptions are we testing?
  • what do we expect to happen?
  • If that happens, what do we take from that? (I guess, we validate or invalidate the hypothesis).

The importance of building evidence

So in the same way that we have hypotheses for product development, product management, and service delivery — not all of our ideas are good ideas and we need to build up some evidence whether these are the right ideas or not.

This body of knowledge that I am sharing with you is essentially a set of hypotheses. With hypotheses, I need to see if when you replace one behavior with another, will it actually make a difference? It would be lovely if we could have pure cause and effect like that, but in complexity, it’s not so simple. It would be difficult to do randomized controlled trials with something like this.

I have consulted with well over 40 people in Agility and Executive Leadership and there is some form of alignment that these might be good hypotheses. I would really like your support in gathering evidence on whether some of these hypotheses are valid or invalid so we can improve the overall series of behavioural replacements.

I am not telling you that this is a recipe. Some of these things might work, some of these things might not work. On balance, we are saying try these things. We are saying avoid some of these other things. What I will be doing later in this series is I will be re-wording each of the behavioral replacements as a hypothesis. So, hopefully, by seeing each of these behavioral replacements as hypotheses, you will understand that this is not deterministic. We do not know for certain what will happen. We have strong feelings and opinions, but just like in Product Development and Product Management, opinions are one thing, evidence is something else.

What I would like you to do is to come on this journey with us and see what evidence we can acquire together.

Thank you.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Lean Startup

Scrum: How long should your Sprint be? Single vs Multi Scrum Teams
Thinkers360
December 05, 2023

Did you ever notice that a lot of scrum teams are having two-week sprints? Is that the right thing to do?

A lot of people say we need to be consistent, we need to have the same sprint length so that we’re all on the same rhythm, etc.

I think there is a fundamental problem with that.

Why would you have every team having the same sprint? There might be some situations where that would be valid. The first thing I would say is, let’s just start with a single Scrum team.

A single Scrum team working on a product because Scrum is for product development, not so much for project management. This team is delivering a product.

How long should their sprint be?

Single Scrum Teams

I wouldn’t be going for the most popular sprint length. I would be asking a few questions, most importantly, how long does it take you to deliver a done increment?

How long does it take you to deliver a done increment?

Do you have a decent Definition of Done (DoD)?

In Scrum, we have a definition of done (DoD). This is like the checklist for how we do things around here. This includes the quality standards and maybe with elements of product quality in there as well. Technical standards and product quality.

Assuming a decent Scrum team has a definition of done, one which the team respects (because if they respect it, they can then have some hope of continually improving it), how long does it take them to deliver a done increment?

How long does it take them to deliver a done increment?

If it takes them three weeks, well, maybe you should have a three-week sprint. I do not see the point of having a two-week sprint for a team that needs three weeks to deliver a done increment.

If it takes you three weeks to get something to done (according to the definition of done) we do not want people taking any shortcuts with that. We do not want people building up accidental technical debt or making the product increment a lower quality. On that note, stick to how long it takes to deliver a done increment.

Does it take longer than 30 days to deliver a done increment? Make your product backlog items smaller, here’s how

Now, where it becomes problematic is where it takes longer than 30 days to deliver a done increment. In that case, I think you have got bigger problems than the length of your sprint. You probably have issues with the product backlog items that you’re taking in, they are probably too big. Then you probably need to be looking at some kind of splitting guides.

There are lots of heuristics out there in terms of how you can break some items down. Failing all of that, you can use example mapping from behavioral-driven development, where maybe you list out 25 examples for this product backlog item that will be needed by the time you go live. In response to people saying “We can’t deliver this in a sprint, it’s going to take six weeks, we can’t deliver it in 30 days”. I say “Can you just do the first example?”

“What do you mean? We know we have to do the second and the third example as well”.

“Yes, I know, but you can just do the first example?”

Let’s just get some feedback and see how we get on with the first example because the Sprint Review is like an event where people find out what they don’t want when they see it. People struggle to articulate what they want.

Consider example mapping as a technique to maybe get the item size a bit smaller so you can do things in 30 days. I had a chat with Tobias Mayer on the Xagility Podcast and he challenged me. He said we can always do something in 30 days. I think the man is right. I think you can do something in 30 days.

There’ll be some rare exceptions where that’s not the case. So one consideration is have you got a done increment? How long does it take you to deliver a done increment?

Dealing with Product Owners injecting change into the Sprint

Another consideration would be the product owner changing his/her mind about what needs to be done and injecting change into the sprint. Now, it is possible. You are allowed to bring change into a sprint. You are allowed to introduce product backlog items during the sprint, as long as you’re not compromising the sprint goal. But people don’t do that because normally we don’t have enough evidence to say that we’re not going to compromise the sprint goal.

So unless you are using Scrum with Kanban, you will not have the information to answer that question. As such, we tend to avoid bringing changes in during a sprint, and we probably want to keep it that way so the team can be focused, so they can get what they started finished and we can get some feedback sooner.

If you have a situation where you have a four-week sprint, you can deliver a done increment in three weeks and the product owner wants to put change in, if you change your sprint time from four weeks to three weeks, what you’ve done is you’ve changed the average wait time for a new sprint from two weeks down to a week and a half.

Ordinarily, I would say a product owner will probably be willing to wait a week and a half on average. It could be the wrong end of the sprint, in which case the spring goal might be obsolete and that’s a different story. I’ve only had one of those occasions in my career. So I would say the length of your sprint should be how long does it take you to deliver a done increment?

Other considerations for how long your Sprint should be

Also, maybe how long does it take you to do customer user research, maybe UX, and so on? Maybe you want to get some response from prototypes, interviews, all that kind of stuff. So there’s that consideration as well if you’re using Scrum with UX.

But for most Scrum teams who are not so much into experimentation (I wish more were into experimentation), then you would ask “How long does it take you to deliver a done increment?” and no shorter than that so that the product owner has maximum flexibility, so when new changes come in into the product backlog, there’s an opportunity to bring those into a sprint sooner because the next sprint planning is going to be sooner.

It’s not as straightforward as that though, because most of us don’t work in single-team products. We’ve got multiple teams working on the product.

What do you do then when you have multiple teams?

Well, the scaling frameworks that I am most comfortable talking about are Nexus and LeSS.

Nexus

In Nexus, if, say, for example, the overall product group had a four-week sprint, it’s fine for some teams to spin around inside that with a one-week sprint or a two-week sprint or for slower teams, a four-week sprint.

As long as you’ve got the same boundary that, in other words, the multiplication needs to work one, two, four, one, and three, they would work. So you could have faster teams spinning around faster within the Nexus Sprint.

Why would you have a team that could deliver stuff in a week, being stuck to a three-week sprint? Nexus allows you to do it that way.

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)

On the other hand, in LeSS, the entire product group has the same sprint length. So if we all have a four-week sprint, every team has a four-week sprint, or they have a three-week sprint or two-week sprint. Whatever the sprint length is, we are all doing it at the same time.

That’s not a bad reason, you don’t want a situation where you come looking for help in my team and I’m not available because I’m in sprint planning for my team. That problem is avoided when every team does their events at the same time, including product backlog refinements being done at the same time in LeSS.

So there, I can see the upside of that where everybody would have the same sprint in that case, but I would hope that no team has a sprint length that’s shorter than it takes them to deliver a done increment. As such, be careful, I would say, about having this default position of just having two-week sprints because it’s the most popular sprint length.

Concluding Remarks

I think the first question you should be asking is, how long does it take us to deliver a done increment? It should be no shorter than that. If you’ve got problems delivering within 30 days, you’ve got bigger problems than the size of your sprint. You have got problems with your product backlog refinement.

Meanwhile, consider example mapping, consider maybe looking at the first example to break down part of backlog items so they fit into smaller sprints so you can deliver a done increment in a shorter period in 30 days or less.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Lean Startup

Kanban: Service Level Expectation (SLE) and the different types of work items
Thinkers360
November 30, 2023
 

Example Workflow

I want you to imagine that you’ve got a workflow. In this workflow, imagine there’s a backlog. In the backlog, there are lots of items, maybe there are different types of work going on:

  • blue work; and
  • yellow work in this case.

To-Do Column

There’s a “To-Do Column” where we’re confirming to a customer that we’re going to start something.

In-Progress Column

Then we’re actually doing the work. Maybe we have two “In-Progress” dates:

  • in progress one and
  • in progress two.

Done Column

Then we’re basically shipping what we’ve done to our customers.

Review Column

Then we’re reviewing some outcomes.

That would be the workflow that we’re going to talk about today.


Different Types of Work Item Types in Kanban

On the workflow referred to above, not only are there blue items and yellow items, but imagine also there are some red items.

There are different types of work on the system.

How many “Started” and “Finished” points can you have on a workflow?

You can have a number of started points and finished points on a workflow.

In this example, imagine we only have one.

  1. The “Started” point is the border between the “Backlog” and “To-Do” columns.
  2. The “Finished” point is the border between the “Shipped” and “Review outcomes” (because we care about outcomes). You could argue we should be doing it later than that, getting the feedback, seeing what’s going on, and so forth.

Service Level Expectation (SLE)

In Kanban, it’s possible to have a Service Level Expectation (SLE). Not only is it possible, but you should have a Service Level Expectation on the board.

When one new item starts (based on either an initial guess, statistics, or performance) we should be able to say, with some kind of percentage (I usually go with 85 percent because it’s between 70 and 100) that when we start an item, it’s finished in, say, 8 days or less, 85% of the time.

You could actually have an SLE for the entire board, of 8 days or less, 85% percent of the time.

“But some work is different from others” and “How do we use SLE in non-software work?”…

I have done a lot of work in non-software, since 2018 in particular, and I get comments from people that some work is different from others.

It’s quite a strong message that people are giving me that some work is different from others.

What I also noticed was that when I tell people, let’s say, on this imaginary board, that:

  • you’ve got an item and
  • imagine the item (say the Red Item for example) is actually four days old.

That might actually not look too bad on the board because it’s eight days or less, 85% of the time and it’s in the second “asked” column on the board.

Say it’s four days, it might be okay.

But actually, that work item type might typically take less. In this example, I have come up with a service level expectation for each work item type.

Work-item types are optional, but they could make your life easier. Here’s how I use them:

You don’t have to use work item types, it’s optional. I find them very useful.

I find them useful from the point of view is it stops me from losing the audience. Because people tend to gloss over when we’re trying to treat everything like they’re all apples, when maybe there are some oranges and grapes in there as well. Even if statistically, there’s some kind of an argument to be made, psychology doesn’t really work.

What I tend to do is put an SLE on the board for the different work item types. Why? Because if you have a red item, which has a Service Level Expectation of say 3 days or less and it’s currently four days old, that is a bit of a problem because this item is taking longer than 85% of items before, and it’s in danger of being late. It’s not even in the last column. So when you look at it in that lens, it’s much more useful.

In addition to that, on each work item on the board that’s in the system, you could report progress in terms of how is that item doing against its own Service Level Expectation.

You could, if you wanted to, have some kind of progress bar under each of these, saying, for this type of work item (e.g. a yellow item) that takes 10 days or less, how far through its SLE has it gone so far.

Kanbanize is a new feature that does that exactly, and I find it very, very useful. So what you can see on the card itself, there would be a progress bar underneath it. Imagine there was a green color on that. You can show that it’s made this much progress through its Service Level Expectation, but there’s still a bit to go. You could even have it going red as well if it was gone way beyond that.


Concluding Remarks

What I want to leave you with today is the idea that work item types can be useful. When you use work item types, don’t miss the opportunity of having a Service Level Expectation per work item type.

I noticed that a lot of teams struggle to check the analytics, to look at the charts, to see how they’re doing. If you can manage to bring the analytics to the board, it’s half the battle. If someone can see that a red item that’s four days old is actually very late for that type of work item, it might get a different reaction from the team. They might realize, hang on a second, only three in twenty items are as slow as this. Maybe we need to do something about this.

I’d like to say one other thing about service level expectations. While my preference is the 85th percentile, looking at the data, looking at cycle time scatter plot of all the cycle times of the work and so on, you could draw a ruler around, say, the 85th percentile and say, that’s my SLE for the 85th percentile. But if your 95th percentile was actually double that, what I tend to do in that case is I also publish the 95th percentile on the board, because it could actually be misleading.

People might think they’re okay. It’s fine. But actually, if the 95th percentile is double the cycle time of the 85th percentile because of so much unpredictability in the system, that’s useful information.

So if you can show that not only a work item has blown the 85th percentile, but it’s also blown the 95th, I think that makes people wake up and smell the coffee a little bit.

Work item types and service level expectations are really nice things to have on your Kanban board. Hopefully, you’re blessed enough to have some kind of tool that allows you to do this automatically. There are some other add-on tools that you can get in the market as well that might help you.

If you use a physical board, it should be fairly straightforward to do something like this.

Just again on work item types, they are optional. The reason I use work item types is to reduce the anxiety of the people using the board and to help people to feel more comfortable with the charts and the statistics that I might be showing to them.

We do have to strike a balance between looking at the metrics and having a bit of fun. You have to be careful that you don’t bash people over the head with these Service Level Expectations and work item aging charts to the extent that people are actually losing interest. You need to deal with the human factors as well. But as long as you’re not overplaying this card too much, I’d highly recommend that you think about having Service Level Expectations for work item types on your boards.

Thank you very much.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Lean Startup

What is a "funnel" in Kanban?
Thinkers360
September 19, 2023

In the Kanban Guide, we define Kanban. We bring Kanban down to the minimal aspects, and we hope you find that helpful.

In doing so, we made a lot of things optional. One of the things that is optional in the definition of workflow is a backlog. You do not have to have a backlog on a definition of workflow, and I wrote about defining your workflow in a previous article.

Funnel is another optional container, if you like, another piece of your workflow that you can have. If you did have a backlog, a funnel might be a backlog for a backlog.

So, it can be helpful in situations where you’ve got a roadmap, and maybe you’re doing something like now, next, or later.

  • now → would be whatever is in progress;
  • next → might be what is in the backlog (if you have a backlog); and
  • later → might be what is after whatever is in the backlog.

Some might call it a hopper, a pool of ideas; whatever you want to call it is fine.

The general intent behind a funnel is that it’s for items that we haven’t really considered properly yet.

People have submitted some ideas; they are in the funnel. But we don’t know if they will end up in the backlog yet. So if you did have a backlog, if you did have some kind of prioritization, that’s something you can do.

Remember that even if you have a backlog in Kanban, the backlog is not necessarily ordered. So, this whole notion of sequencing a backlog is more a thing for Scrum than Kanban. It’s not something that we necessarily do in Kanban.

Thank you for reading.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

What is the definition of workflow in Kanban?
Thinkers360
August 31, 2023

Why understanding the definition of workflow is important

In my opinion, the section on the definition of workflow in the Kanban Guide is probably the most important section. If you don’t understand your definition of workflow, many other things don’t work that well in the Kanban Guide as a result. If you don’t get that part, it’ll be difficult to really make progress.

What is meant by “defining your workflow”?

Define the work items

In the Kanban Guide, we talk about having a definition of workflow.

For a start, you need to define the kind of work items that might flow through that system. Some people use stories, for example, features, experiments, etc. → what kind of items might be going through?

You don’t need to have work item types per se. In the Kanban Guide, they’re optional. In non-software, they are more useful in reducing antibodies from people.

People tend to say, well, some things take longer than others, and it’s often a debate not worth having in the early stages because there is actually some merit in non-software where some different work item types do take different lengths of time.

But putting it very simply → you need to define what kind of work goes through the system.

Are your work items delivering value?

Are your work items delivering value?

One thing is clear: we do not have fake work items going through the system. In other words, you don’t have items that don’t deliver value. Each item should deliver value, or at least we hope it’ll deliver value; the idea is that it will deliver value.

So as soon as we deliver it, we can confirm whether it did deliver value or not, but we have the potential to release value, whether that’s customer value, end-user value, market value, organizational value, societal value, maybe a reduction of risk or it could be learning.

What should you have in the “definition of workflow”?

Started/Finished Points

On the definition of workflow, you need to have at least:

  • 1x “STARTED” point; and
  • 1x “FINISHED” point.

There’s no limit really to how many “STARTED” points and how many “FINISHED” points you can have. Some “STARTED” points can overlap, and some “FINISHED” points can overlap.

You can even have a “STARTED” point at the start of a column and a “FINISHED” point at the end of a column. That is acceptable.

BUT whatever you have as your “STARTED” point and your “FINISHED” point, you will have four measures to go along with that as well.

So there’ll be:

  • work in progress → what are the items that are in between the “STARTED” point and the “FINISHED” point?;
  • throughput → how many work items are passing the “FINISHED” point per time period;
  • work item age → how old are the items? How much time has elapsed since the items passed the “STARTED” point, and they have not yet hit the “FINISHED” point?; and
  • cycle time → how long does the work item take to get from the “STARTED” point to the “FINISHED” point.

For each “STARTED” point to “FINISHED” point that you have, the four metrics will apply for EACH of those ranges.

So if you’ve got a “STARTED” point here, a “FINISHED” point there, another “STARTED” point here, “FINISHED” point there = The four measures will apply to each.

On the definition of workflow, you also need to show the steps through which the work needs to go through for value to be delivered. So from the “STARTED” point to the “FINISHED” point, are there steps that the work needs to go through? The simplest definition of workflow might have a “STARTED” point with one column and then a “FINISHED” point, and the work just takes as long as it takes to get through that column.

There might be a column as well for where the work goes past where it is actually delivered, and we call that throughput.

Throughput = would be the measure of how many items get past the “FINISHED” point in a particular period of time, be it a day, a week, sprint or etc.

Why do you need explicit policies in your definition of workflow?

Explicit policies in your definition of workflow

On the definition of workflow, you also need to have explicit policies to demonstrate how work gets through the system.

The Kanban Guide isn’t explicit about this, but you might have, for example:

  • A “Start/Replenishment policy” → how do you decide when items come in past the “STARTED” point;
  • A “Prioritization policy” → if you were to start, which item would you start?
  • A “Pull or Move policy” → for all the items that are in progress, if someone has capacity, which item will they work on next? It’s not always necessarily the item that you were just working on.
  • A policy that says it’s based on, for example, relative item age → or you might say, we will focus on blocked items first and aging, and then we’re going to look at some other considerations.
  • A policy for “blocked items” → what do you do when items are blocked? How is work in progress affected when items are blocked? Do we include blocked items in our work-in-progress (WIP) limits, or do we have some exceptions where, for example, an item has been blocked for 60 days and we made all the phone calls, sent all the emails, shook the tree, nothing’s happening and we are thinking of canceling the item. Perhaps maybe we need to put traffic on around this. We do want to exclude this item from our WIP so we can take in another item. Your “blocked policy” could be explicit about this situation.
  • Exit criteria or entry criteria per column” on your definition of workflow → this makes it really clear to the Kanban system members when an item is supposed to move, for example, from one column to the next one, how do we know that it can legally do that?

Sometimes, Kanban system members ask me:

— “Is it okay for this item to move from that column to that column?”

— I say, “What does your policy say?”

— “It actually says we need to do X, Y, and Z”.

— I reply, “Well, have you done X, Y, and Z?”

— They say “no”.

— I say, “It has to stay in the column unless your policy is wrong, of course, you can update your policies periodically. You can do it at any time, in fact.”

BUT we tend to reserve changes of explicit policies for retrospectives. These are informal sessions where we consider how we can work better as Kanban system members.

  • Consider how WIP will be controlled between the “STARTED” point and the “FINISHED” point → by which means are we going to ensure that work in progress doesn’t exceed a certain amount? You might have, for example, work-in-progress limits over certain columns, on certain swim lanes (if you use swim lanes), on the active columns, for example, between the “STARTED” point and the “FINISHED” point. You can control work in progress in various ways, but the team needs to be explicit about that.
  • There needs to be a service level expectation (SLE) → which is essentially an aspiration for how long items would take to get from the “STARTED” point to the “FINISHED” point. It’s not a service level agreement; it’s just that if we take an unstarted item and think about starting it, based on probabilities, what’s the likelihood based on previous cycle times? How long is that item likely to take?

We can either use:

  1. an aspiration;
  2. we can base it on a guess; or
  3. we can use it based on historical data.

My preference is to do it based on historical data so that we are using data to inform our decision-making.

The importance of Rightsizing

Righsizing items

When Kanban system members think about taking an item in, they probably will look at rightsizing the item.

Kanban guide doesn’t mandate that, but it would probably be recommended to look at the item and say, “does this feel like it fits within SLE?” If it doesn’t fit within our SLE, then maybe we need to break it down.

Can you have more than one definition of workflow?

Can you have more than one definition of workflow?

One other point that I would want to make clear about the Kanban Guide is that you can have more than one definition of workflow on your Kanban board.

In some cases, that’s really recommended. You might have different types of work going through the system. You might have different customers, etc. There might be some reason why swim lanes wouldn’t be enough to segregate the work, where you actually might need different, almost like different Kanban designs → so you can actually have more than one definition of workflow on a Kanban board.

You might have operational work, you might have investment work going through the board, and it might make sense that there are different columns, for example, for those different definitions of workflow. It might feel a bit too artificial having all that work going through the same definition workflow because, actually the work doesn’t quite fit that workflow.

There are other ways, of course. For example, if you had a whiteboard, you’d put crosses through the columns or the boxes, the cells where they don’t apply for this particular type of work. But on electronic boards, we tend not to have that flexibility, we tend to have an extra definition of workflow for different situations on the same Kanban board.

Another example of that would be flight levels → you might have a:

  • operational boards → for individual teams on a value stream;
  • coordination board → going across a value stream; and
  • strategy board → for new investments coming in informed by what’s already in progress at the coordination level.

Concluding Remarks

There are lots of reasons why you might have more than one definition of workflow on the Kanban board, and it’s completely legal to do that. I would say that sometimes it is expected.

Thank you.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management

Is release planning done in scrum? Managing Stakeholder expectations & forecasting
Thinkers360
August 22, 2023

First of all, what is meant by release planning? (An old-fashioned term, but we’re still stuck with it).

What is “release planning”?

What people mean by “release planning” is trying to forecast when we will deliver certain things when certain releases might happen, and we might not know for sure what’s on those releases.

In Scrum, the product owner will decide when the releases are but might not know for sure what will be on those releases. In fact, because of so much uncertainty, the real answer is we don’t know. We don’t know what will be delivered, what functionality will be delivered, and we don’t know when we will solve particular problems.

We’re dealing with so much uncertainty. BUT we do make some efforts sometimes to figure out when certain things might be delivered, and the most useful way that I have found to do that is using Monte Carlo Probabilistic Forecasting.

Navigating uncertainty: What is Monte Carlo Probabilistic Forecasting?

When using probabilistic forecasting, one option is to essentially guesstimate as a team how small and big the backlog might be for a given goal/release.

I like to say, give me a 90% chance you’re right, 10% chance you’re wrong kind of guess. Give me a range. How small could the product backlog be? How big could the product backlog be?

You could also guesstimate how few items you deliver in a sprint and how many items you deliver in a sprint. I prefer to do it based on data — so if you actually have some data in terms of what was delivered in a sprint, that is really forecasting because if you don’t have data in terms of what you’re delivering, you are still just estimating.

Estimates are just estimates. They’re not commitments. Scrum has moved on. Check out my InfoQ article on Sizing & Forecasting in Scrum.

Even forecasts aren’t commitments. We are so used to getting weather forecasts that way, and we’re used to the uncertainty in the weather forecasts. We understand that it can be wrong; the same is true for product development.

Using Monte Carlo Probabilistic Forecasting & Throughput

You can use Monte Carlo Probabilistic Forecasting, you can use commercial tools, or you can use free tools. Random numbers are generated between how small the backlog might be and how big the backlog might get, and the min/max of throughput for the relevant period is (how many items you deliver in a sprint to how big the throughput gets per sprint).

Throughput = how many items you deliver in a (time period, e.g., a) sprint to how big the throughput gets

You might even look at the median of throughput as well as min/max in some tools. Great tools consider the work already in progress.

EXAMPLE:

Say maybe 10,000, maybe a million simulations are run. From that, you get a projection of different dates when it’s likely the work will be delivered by different dates.

Side note: avoid picking the middle because that’s like 50–50 heads or tails, a 50% chance of delivery based on the data. But ACTUALLY you’ll find it’s not 50–50 because we know we’ll have a different forecast next week; things will change.

So I like to say if I don’t get 50–50, I go more to the right-hand side of the histogram forecast. Maybe 70%, 85%, let’s say the 85th percentile — I’d say 85% chance that we can deliver by that date.

That means a 15% chance we can’t, but I’ll give you a better forecast next week, which essentially means we don’t know. It’s just a nice way of calculating it.

You can also do this as well based on relative positions on the product backlog, but we also know that the backlog could change. At a sprint review, new ideas are usually much better than the old ideas, so it’s like a new set of clean plates on top of the old plates in a restaurant. Those old plates get pushed down, and so items lower down the backlog get pushed down. Consequently, the items on the backlog might get pushed further and further away.

But if people are concerned about particular items in the backlog, it might never happen. This is because those new ideas are usually better than the older ideas, and we do want to be chasing value.

The best thing we can get with a traditional approach is what we asked for. The best thing we can achieve with an agile approach is something much better because the sprint review is where the customer or end-user gets to see what she asks for but doesn’t want. We give them frequent opportunities to figure that out.

Where is the best place to look at the forecast?

The best place to collectively look at the forecast with stakehodlers would be the sprint review. That’s because the stakeholders, including the customers and the end-users, are at the sprint review.

You can also look at a few sprints ahead in sprint planning, BUT that’ll be private within the team because stakeholders aren’t invited to sprint planning. We might have some technical experts that are invited to give us some extra knowledge in sprint planning, but if you want stakeholders who are trying to understand what’s going on with the product AND they want to understand when things will be done, THEN those stakeholders would attend the sprint review and maybe some other ad hoc sessions.

BUT in Scrum, there’s an event called Sprint Review, and out of the four inspect and adapt events, the sprint review might be the best place to review what’s going on, where we’re going, whether it’s time to trim the tail due to diminishing returns, and move onto the next product goal.

Burn-up charts: are they in or are they out?

There is another option as well — quite an old-fashioned approach in Scrum. Burn-up charts allow us to look at how we’re doing, how much work we are burning, how many items we are finishing, and so on. Then you can draw a trend line. You can say, well, if that trend keeps going, and you could have a scope line across the top and where those lines meet, the trend of what we’re burning against the scope line at the top. Then you drop it down to the calendar date in the future, and you’ll see that we might deliver by this date.

But that’s 50–50 heads or tails. It’s not very good. And remember, we’ll have a better forecast next week. So it’s actually under 50–50, really.

Depending on how much noise you have in your throughput as the team, how many items the team is delivering will kind of dictate the gaps between the optimistic and the pessimistic lines of the burn-up chart.

Concluding Remarks

I find burn-up charts to be quite dangerous because people tend to see what they want to see. Optimistic people will see the optimistic line; pessimistic people see the pessimistic line. It’s difficult to get people aligned. We also call this the cone of uncertainty, where there’s a gap between the most optimistic date and the most pessimistic date for a given amount of scope if you like.

The word “scope” is alien to Scrum as well because we are trying to fix problems and avail of opportunities, not deliver outputs. We’re trying to deliver value. We’re trying to deliver value as quickly as possible to discover the value sooner.

So forecasting and release mapping can be done as part of scrum, which is a typical practice. I’m nervous about roadmaps other than Now, Next Later or Transformation Maps with elongating and more vague timelines. The Product Goal is in the direction of travel, and we discover through good empiricism if the goal is wrong. There is a human tendency to persevere instead of pivot or stop when the evidence is compelling. We should not persevere. Give Scrum its due; the Sprint Review is a great opportunity to pause and reflect if the Product Goal is still worth pursuing.

My preferred approach to forecasting is Monte Carlo Probabilistic Forecasting.

One health warning with Monte Carlo Probabilistic Forecasting is if the throughput of your team is irregular, if your team is maybe not delivering so often, or if the team has sprints where they don’t deliver anything, or the team is delivering everything on the last day of the sprint, for example, the quality of your Monte Carlo Probabilistic Forecast is going to be less because from a statistical point of view when it’s looking at your historical throughput, most days you deliver nothing.

So that will not be a great forecast, but if you have problems with your forecast with Monte Carlo because of irregular throughput, you’ve actually got bigger problems with forecasting; you got a plumbing problem. You need to fix the plumbing problem before you’re worried about your forecasting problem.

Never ever use flow metrics for sub-tasks. We’re maximizing potential value, not activities.

Thank you. 

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Business Strategy

Should a scrum master become a product owner?
Thinkers360
April 25, 2023

Scrum Guide

Scrum Accountabilities

  1. developers → the people doing the work, delivering a high-quality done increment.

So what’s the problem?

Let’s go through all possible combinations

Exploring the Scrum Master Role

  1. observing through listening, sensing, smelling, whatever senses they’ve got available;
  2. mentoring, giving advice, coaching, maybe asking Socratic questions teaching, coaching, mentoring, with permission. Don’t inflict help on people;
  3. acting as a change agent;
  4. keeping an eye on the scrum implementation;
  5. working with the rest of the organization to help them to understand how scrum and agility works; and
  6. removing impediments that are beyond the control and influence of the team.

Exploring the Product Owner Role

  1. The product owner really should be doing a lot of work in product management;
  2. Product ownership;
  3. Commercial pricing;
  4. Looking at customer analytics;
  5. Visiting customers; and
  6. Managing the expectations of stakeholders, and connecting with them. Managing their expectations in terms of uncertainty. Setting their expectations that we don’t know when we will be done. We’re committing sprint by sprint. We’re using an iterative, incremental approach. We’re trying to work empirically here.

Why shouldn’t scrum masters be product owners?

See blog

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management

What is Kanplexity? Why should you care about it? And how is it different to simply adopting Kanban?
Thinkers360
April 06, 2023

 

How is Kanplexity different to Kanban as a standalone framework? 

Kanban is a strategy to optimize the flow of value through a visual pull- based system. 

There are three practices:

  1. Define your workflow → your definition of workflow. Essentially this is your Kanban board with all your policies and exit criteria for the various columns and what type of work goes through the system.
  2. Actively manage the work → In practice this might mean on a daily basis, look at what work is aging in the system. If work is aging, we can deal with it quickly and hopefully avoid our cycle times (how long things take), from increasing. We can try to stabilize or improve our throughput.

I wrote a blog post providing more detail on what is a cycle time. Check it out here.

  1. Review and improve your definition of workflow → to improve your Kanban board and improve your policies. This means to observe how we are getting on with the metrics and the charts. Kanban alone does help you to deal with complexity. Already, you’re getting lots of signals.

I wrote a blog post on this, lot of signals about what’s going on. Check it out here

What is Kanban missing?

What Kanban is missing is a compass.

The Cynefin Sense-Making Framework

Cynefin, the sensemaking framework, from Cynefin.io is a wonderful compass to help you to understand what might be the right approach and the right leadership stance in a given situation. 

Do we need to just get the experts together because they know what they’re doing, and let them solve it out?

OR

Do we need a large group facilitation in the complex space? Do we need an experimental loop? Do we need someone to turn into a dictator in negative chaos? Do we just trust the team to just crack on with it and we focus on doing lots of automation between the complicated and the clear space?

The compass we need

Cynefin is a lovely compass for complexity, but you need somebody in each team to be skilled on that compass. 

What we expect in Kanplexity is that there would be one person who would act as a guide. That person could be a member of the team, but would typically be a kind of an agile leader. 

This is someone who is acting, behaving in an agile way, acting as a backstage leader at times, sometimes leading from the front, but they’re able to read that compass and they know what we should be doing next.

They know: 

  • what to facilitate for; 
  • what to optimize for; 
  • what to measure.; 
  • what to encourage and what to discourage in that particular space. 

In addition to that, in my opinion Kanplexity gives very clear guidance on what we expect of a guide apart from complexity. 

So a leader needs to cultivate an environment where agility can grow.

You can have all the Kanban teams in the world, all the scrum teams in the world trying to knock themselves out, doing wonderful Kanban, Scrum, trying to make sense of what’s going on and deal with the complexity that’s in front of them. 

…but if we don’t have an environment where that agility can grow, we’re going to struggle.

What does Kanplexity bring to the table?

Kanplexity adds a compass of Cynefin. 

Someone who can read that compass, but also someone who acts and behaves in a really agile way so that teams can be really successful instead of having artificial accountabilities where we delegate change to those particular accountabilities. 

We already have leaders, we already have managers. Let’s use them to do good things and cultivate that environment where agility can really grow and where the organization together, not just individual teams, but across teams of teams, help the organization to really grow. 

On that point, Kanplexity, not only has a place for management, but it also has a place for multiple teams and has very clear guidance and how multiple teams can work together and avoid, consider, try favor type format in terms of what you should look at, maybe what you should not look at. 

Further it shows some love towards project management because project managers get a hard time in the scrum world and some project managers are really good. A lot of project managers such as at Amazon are doing quite well and actually have a very agile mindset.

Concluding Remarks

Kanplexity has a home for people who are willing to behave in a very agile way, but still have projects in front of them. 

That’s how Kanplexity has clear water from Kanban.

Thank you.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management

How will UX and Design thinking influence how executives fund product development in the future?
Thinkers360
April 05, 2023

Design thinking has been around for a while. UX has been around for a long time. 

Human-centered engineering was being talked about even when I went to university a long, long time ago, but it seems that the world has cottoned on to the whole idea of discovery.

UX

In UX, one of the patterns is Lean UX from Joshua Seiden and Jeff Gothelf. There’s a couple of different versions of design thinking out there. One from Stanford and one from IDEO. 

All pretty much have the same ethos:

How can we really fill the funnel with work in product development when we don’t have that much confidence that we’re going to get the value?

Treat ideas as assumptions to be validated

A lot of the time people build business cases for some piece of product development, that they’re going to earn so many millions, that they are going to build it in this market. All sorts of wonderful things. 

Really clever executives treat a lot of the ideas as assumptions that need to be validated.

In particular, the Lean Start-up started this maybe 10 or more years ago by saying what is quality if you don’t know who the customer is

One more time: what is quality if you don’t know who the customer is?

The idea was why would you build a high quality, full-fledged product? Why would you fill your funnel with all that stuff when actually we haven’t validated whether people actually want that idea, whether they want that product?

Minimum viable product (MVP)

People have used minimum viable product as well, and it has become a little bit distorted. 

It has turned into: 

  • what is the worst product we can deliver in the timeframe?

INSTEAD OF:

  • what’s the least amount of work we need to do to learn the next most important thing?.

The learning revolution in the sea of agility

I think learning is the big change. I see a wave in the sea of agility at the moment from delivery to discovery to delivery or discovery to not delivery, to find the ideas that you should not build. 

One of the reasons why the Lean Start-up came about was as a reaction to the .com bubble burst. 

10 years before Lean Start-up came out, people had been raising loads of venture capital money and burning loads of money. I remember people used to have bragging rights for how much money they raised and burning hundreds of millions of dollars. 

The idea when the Lean Start-up came along was why do you have to burn all this money? Why don’t we just do really cheap experiments to figure out if people even want this?

Why don’t we just do really cheap experiments to figure out if people even want this?
  • Are these the right customers? 
  • Are these the right users? 
  • Will they pay for this? 

Maybe the price point that we have in mind is $15 but the customer may only be prepared to pay 15 cents, or maybe they want it to be free. 

Maybe it’s the wrong solution. Maybe the market isn’t ready yet. Maybe we need to do something more complete.

If you have lots of evidence as an executive that we should build this product and all the ideas within the product, you should just build it. 

But the reality is that there will be lots of ideas in your product where you won’t really have that much confidence about whether you’re going to harvest the value.

They might seem like good idea. But as an executive, you do not want to put those ideas out there and it’s like crickets and tumble weed and nothing happens. You’re left wondering why did customers not come to my product? 

The modern approach

These days executives need to: 

  • be talking more regularly to customers, end users;
  • visiting all the markets; AND
  • Seeing customers in the eye. 

I know we live in a distributed world now, but going out, visiting people, really understanding what’s going on beyond the Teams and Zoom calls, try to get informal conversations where you really find out what’s going on. 

Understand what the customers are really looking for and listen to what customers are complaining about, ask better questions like what are your coping strategies at the moment? Do you have viable workarounds? 

When customers complain about things, that doesn’t necessarily mean they need you to deliver a solution. We have lots and lots of ideas but I think between 60 and 90% of those ideas should never be built. You will discover lots of better ideas by accident if you run cheap experiments to find out… is there value here?

Between 60 and 90% of those ideas should never be built.

Experiment example

The guy in Zappos who wanted to figure out if women would buy expensive shoes online. He built a beautiful website. It was lovely, but there was nothing behind it. When somebody ordered, he just received an email, went out to the store, bought the shoes, packed it up in Zappos packaging and sent it off by FedEx to the customer.

He didn’t lose his shirt, he didn’t burn millions building a big fulfillment system. 

He did validate the idea. 

Women with expensive taste and shoes did buy shoes online and they didn’t just return them after parting one night. They were honest and there was a general pattern of ethical customers buying high quality products, branded products on his website.

Concluding remarks

These are the kind of experiments you need to do before you lose your shirt or your blouse. 

Do some really cheap experiments to validate those ideas. It’s the way of the future. 

For me, Scrum.org has a wonderful class called Scrum with UX. My most popular class actually, it’s a lovely way of discovering those ideas that you don’t need to build.

Kanban is about delivering things faster, optimize the delivery of value. 

But you can even optimize it more by not putting more things into the funnel. You can use UX and design thinking to discover those ideas you should never build.

Thank you.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Lean Startup

What is throughput in Kanban and how do you measure it?
Thinkers360
April 04, 2023

What is throughput?

The number of items that the Kanban system members deliver to the end of the workflow, to the finish point of the workflow every time period.

Example: If your time period is in a day, you’d have a throughput per day. If it’s a week, throughput per week, throughput per spring, throughput per month, per quarter, per semester, and so on.

What is throughput based on?

Throughput is based on the number of work items and work items are valuable.

They value in terms of either:

  • customer value;
  • end user value;
  • market value;
  • organizational value;
  • the reduction of risk value;
  • societal value; AND
  • learning.

Each work item gives value.

When we deliver a work item and we hope we get value, it is potential value. We don’t really know that we have value until we get feedback.

How should you measure throughput?

When you’re measuring a throughput, you should be measuring the delivery rate of work items to the finish point on your definition of workflow in a given time period.

You can have a number of different finished points on your workflow. You’re allowed to have more than one starting point, more than one finish point. You just need a minimum of one.

So you could have for example:

  • throughput to done;
  • throughput to released;
  • throughput to got feedback from the customer;
  • throughput got to, got feedback from the customer, did a tweak and re-released…

and you get the idea.

You could have a number of finished points.

Don’t pollute your throughput number

What I see often is people get a bit confused and they compare apples with oranges and so what they do is they have throughput including sub-tasks under work items and work items themselves, which creates noise. This essentially pollutes the throughput number.

Make sure you’re comparing apples with apples. Make sure that when you’re counting throughput, counting the number of valuable work items that get delivered, they are valuable work items.

Different types of work items and throughput

There is another level of apples and oranges, which is the number of different types of work item that get delivered. Work item types are optional in the Kanban Guide.

They’re very useful in non-software, non-tech, where the difference in the type of work makes a big difference in terms of how long something actually takes.

So you can look at throughput in a time period for type of work A versus type of work B, but remember there’s going to be noise in the system there.

I prefer to measure throughput in a quarter semester, something like that. Even a quarter might be a bit too noisy.

What do I mean by noise? The basket of work might not be equivalent to previous time periods that you’re comparing against. Well, will they ever be comparable?

I guess if the work is in the complex space where you’ve got unknown unknowns, it’s not comparable at all.

Are you delivering real value?

So take it with a pinch of salt. Throughput isn’t the be all and end all. It’s nice to deliver outputs, and that’s essentially what work items are.

The quicker we deliver those outputs, the quicker we can find out and learn if we’re delivering real value.

And so the key is to look at value as well. Is there a way to measure value? There’s a danger that if you focus exclusively on throughput, you could be making the same mistake that some of the people who implement Scrum badly make, which is where they count story points to done and it just becomes a velocity game.

Some would argue that throughput is another way of getting into velocity. So, I’m not going to get into that argument here, but it’s a view that some people have.

Concluding remarks

  • Be careful with counting, because if you’re counting outputs, you’re not really comparing value.
  • Try to find a way to ascertain whether we’re making a difference to our customers. That’s probably the most important thing.
  • Even better if you can try to deliver maybe less outputs, to deliver more outcomes then you’re really winning.

Thank you.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Leadership, Lean Startup

Opinions vs. Evidence — How getting the definitions mixed up can impact the value of your delivery.
Thinkers360
February 23, 2023

Opinions vs. Evidence

Sometimes people get confused between opinions and evidence.

Opinions → internal people, very smart people, but still inside the building thinking this is what customers want. Newsflash…customers don’t know what they want, so how do we know what they want?

Often people confuse and conflate opinions from experts inside the building with evidence, and it’s not evidence.

So what is evidence?…

Can you build it?

I had an interesting conversation with a very good “agilist” the other day, and we were talking about when you need to experiment.

There’s a lovely prioritization canvas from Jeff Gothelf, and I believe, Joshua Seiden that’s in the Lean UX book, third edition.

What is really nice about the prioritization canvas is they look at work items in two dimensions:

  1. So you look at what’s the potential value from this work; and
  2. Then you look at what’s the risk in terms of us getting that value. In other words, how do we rate our ability to harvest the value?

The idea is if it’s low value, why are you doing it anyway or even talking about the bottom half of the 2 by 2 matrix?

At the top half, if you have loads of evidence that people want this and customers and end users are crying out for it, there’s loads of data….

Just build it.

When should you experiment?

If we don’t have much evidence, we need to run some experiments.

Thank you.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management

Are you giving your people the time and space to learn and improve? The 9@9 rule.
Thinkers360
February 22, 2023
Executive leaders, try giving your people time to learn 9 minutes at 9:00 AM daily. Give them the space so that they don’t have any meetings booked in their diary. 

What does it look like in practice?

For the first 15 minutes of every day, they get time to grab a cup of tea/ coffee, and they sit down and watch a video for nine minutes. They’ll read some articles. 

9 minutes at 9 am every day and get people into that habit. Give people permission to do that. 

Why giving 4 hrs weekly may not work…

I hear so often about these programs where you give people 4 hours a week to do learning. 

The problem? You give them 44 hours of work in a 40-hour week. 

They never get time to do that learning, and that’s why you are responsible for the personal development of your people. 

Aren’t we all responsible for personal development?

Unless you give people the space, it’s not going to happen. They need the slack to learn. 

That means you won’t have them planned for all the hours of the week. You’re going to give them nine minutes at 9:00 AM. That is my suggestion. 

Thank you.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management

Where can scrum NOT be used?
Thinkers360
February 21, 2023

The background

The 2020 scrum guide was a major departure for Scrum in that most references to software development were deleted from the scrum guide.

The only reference that even hints at software development is the word developer, one of the accountabilities in Scrum.

The accountabilities

You’ve got:

  • Scrum master;
  • Product owner; and
  • Developer.

The meaning of ‘developer’

Developer in Scrum just means anyone:

  • Doing the work to deliver a done increment; or
  • Helping with the discovery to discover what we maybe should deliver.

Before you try it in your domain, think about this ONE constraint

Scrum could be used in all sorts of domains, but I would not be so arrogant to tell you it can be used in any domain.

It has been used and you can try it in pretty much any domain, but there would be one constraint holding back Scrum or holding back your ability to do Scrum: if you cannot deliver a done increment within 30 days.

Can you deliver a done increment within 30 days?

Scrum is designed for complex product development and for breaking down large problems, large opportunities in smaller chunks, but also not just doing work breakdown, actually doing experiments to discover better ways to deliver value to our customers, to our end-users, to the organization, to society.

If you cannot break down the work so that you can deliver value within 30 days, you will struggle with Scrum. I do see some people using Scrum to express, I saw it only this week, for example, in a team who was so predictable in their flow.

I was looking at their flow analytics and I could see that they had wonderful flow, but I smelled a problem and the smell that I got I think isn’t far off what’s really going on. I suspect the team is breaking down the work so it just fits within the two-week chunks, but actually, those two-week chunks do not deliver value.

That is not Scrum.

What does the increment need to be?

Scrum is about delivering value, about discovering value, and the increment needs to be:

  • valuable;
  • useful; and
  • usable.

If you cannot deliver an increment within 30 days, I don’t think you can use Scrum.

Alternatives

There are some frameworks like Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), for example, where you have another variant called less huge, and it can be a struggle to deliver a done increment within one sprint within one month with many, many teams.

They have coping strategies for how you can improve your definition over time, even over a number of years.

So Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) does have a pathway to help you to use Scrum even if you cannot deliver value within days, but that’s in a huge scaling situation.

For a single-team Scrum, or even for Scrum up to just a number of teams, like eight or nine teams, you should be delivering value every 30 days.

If you can’t do that, I don’t think you should do Scrum. Maybe check out complexity instead, Kanban for complexity (Kanplexity).

Thank you.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management

The 1 question to figure out where you are in the product life cycle
Thinkers360
February 17, 2023

How old is your product?

In the Cynefin Sense-Making framework, you’ve got:

Cynefin Sense-Making Framework
  • The Ordered Space → here you have clear work where people can follow recipes, they know what to do, and they should just do it. Complicated work where you can just bring the right experts to bear or you can do more analysis to figure out what to do. You can essentially get access to the right expertise.
  • The Clear Space → tends to be more about products that are in the latter stages of their life because we really know everything that needs to be done about the product. We’re kind of almost on automatic pilot at this stage. A lot of stuff is automated with our product.
  • The Complicated Space → you might have quite a mature product, so we understand what needs to be done. We don’t have a recipe for everything. We might need to do some analysis. We might need some experts to get together, but if the right people get together, they’ll figure out what to do.
  • The Complex Space → it’s more likely that we’re still in the early stages of product development. We might be crossing the chasm, for example. We might be trying to move from early adoption to, getting greater deployment in the market. We are looking for opportunities to twist some previous inventions, ideas for new purposes, for new problems, and we’re trying to get some fresh thinking so we can figure out a way to overcome the latest problem and deal with the latest situation.
  • Positive chaos → I refer to positive chaos as being near the border, the liminal between complex and chaos, and that’s where we do really want innovation. But this is very early stages, almost start-up stages where we don’t even know what the product might be, who the customer might be, and what the right solution would be. There are so many dimensions that we’re innovating on that it’s a bit chaotic but in a positive way.
  • Negative chaos → You can end up in negative chaos from any part of your product life cycle. You could assume, for example, that something is clear when the product is towards the end of its life, but you’ve actually made a drastic mistake. You’ve been overconfident or you could assume that something that’s complex is predictable. We can do a Gantt chart for that and off we go.

A pattern between where you are in the product life cycle and the kind of complexity you are dealing with

I just want to illustrate that it’s not linear and the way I’ve just described it, isn’t as simple as that. It’s not a categorization system.

But there does seem to be a pattern there between where you are in the product life cycle and what kind of complexity you might be dealing with.

The Aporia/Confused Space

Cynefin is like peeling an onion — the more you peel away, the more you understand that you don’t understand.

But one of the important things in Cynefin is the aporia/confused space because you can deliberately go into aporia and you can try to figure out:

  1. Are we in the right space?
  2. Are we taking the right approach?
  3. Do we actually need to go into a different space and act differently?

Thank you.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management

How do you measure Value in Scrum? (Part 2)
Thinkers360
June 15, 2022

But if cash is coming back in, I guess that’s clear, you could count that. But will it be clear actually that the extra cash that’s come in is because of your team? This is one of the things I like with the logic model, you’ve got inputs, budget, people, customer needs, things like that.

You got activities, all the things we do to deliver the work and then outputs, we actually delivered something that you can release and then you release it and you get some feedback and you hopefully get some outcome out that, but impact is much bigger than us normally. And it’s profit of the company, for example.

So unless you’re a startup or something like that, how do you know actually that the improved cash position helped that. Sometimes the accounting people are very good and they can tell, particularly if you’re looking at organizational value or maybe the cost of not doing something you can see on the bottom line already the difference that we made particularly if you reduce costs but the question I was asked was how do I measure value for a major IT infrastructure piece of work? And the person who asked the question won’t like the answer unless you’re releasing something in chunks along the way, you don’t have any value, zero nada, nothing. And if that time period, is quite long, say 18 months, you’re in a pretty precarious situation because what’s probably going to happen now is people aren’t really going to measure value anymore. They’ll be looking for some proxies. And typically what I see is they’re looking at story points.

Some other kind of proxy measure and sometimes there is story point bingo. So it’s not even an output measure to done it’s like, activity, cuz they’re just playing games with claiming velocity at the end of a sprint. And so then people conflate effort considering complexity and risk with value, which is that we’ve made a difference to the organization, to the world to ourselves, or we’ve learned something more about all of these, if you don’t release, if you don’t have people and even if you do release, if you don’t have people giving feedback about whether we’ve made a difference or not, you don’t have any value. And you’re probably following more a Waterfall profile, which would be where there’s basically no value whatsoever. No value whatsoever. And then we get towards the end and then whew. And I’m actually being optimistic here because I’m assuming that with the Waterfall, that you deliver the same value as the agile guys. But if you think about it with a traditional approach, the best thing you can hope for is what the people asked for.

That’s the best you can hope for and it’s usually not that because the different levels of translation that go on in between and so on. The best you can hope for, with some kind of an agile approach, you could do this with Kanban as well. The best you can hope with an agile approach is something much better than you originally thought of.

And I love what Rich Hundhousen says . He’s one of my peers in scrum.org, he says the sprint review is where the customer gets to see what she asks for, but doesn’t want. You get it? So you go on for a long time. You can use whatever frameworks you want. There’s lots of nice frameworks out there.

Evidence based management for example is really nice. I think Chris Matts has some kind of value hierarchy as well. There’s lovely approaches out there, but the thing is that if you’re not releasing anything, if you are not putting it into hands of someone else where we can actually see if it’s making a difference.

You’re not getting anything.

I did do something in a bank, it was a major application and there was IT infrastructure under the application as well.

And a huge economy was based on it. And the risk was that if we went live that we could damage the economy, no pressure. People were talking about, oh, we need a fixed window. We need 10 hours or whatever it was and blah, blah, blah. I said, this is just too much risk.

No-one’s gonna pull that lever. I certainly wouldn’t pull that lever. So I recommended Martin Fowler’s strangler pattern and it’s a nice little pattern actually, I had a strangler fig in my back garden in Chiswick when I was living there and it was really sad. It was like this little twig.

Image courtesy of Rany ElHousieny

And what it does is it lands in the little crack in a branch, little kind of takes root into the branch and it kind of sucks the nutrients outta the branch. It starts growing, even starts growing its own fruit and everything. I was confused thinking, oh, what’s going on? Oh, I didn’t think that was a big tree.

It was like, it was so good at camouflaging itself on the tree. It looked like it was part of the tree. And then what it does is it drops the roots down to the ground. And then those roots, once the roots get into the ground, the fate of the tree is dead, it’s basically dead. Cause what happens then is it just takes all the nutrients out of the ground that’s even coming into the roots of the tree, grabs all those wraps the tree, and then eventually the tree dies.

And then there’s like a hollow thing inside. So you can actually see these fig plants, you can get them in some garden centers and you should never plant them outside, cause they’ll destroy all your garden. But if you put them in a little box, I guess they’re okay. Anyway the metaphor here is I said gals, guys, what we need to do here is we need to strangle the old system. They said what are you talking about? What we need to do is we need to put just a few transactions through the new system.

But we can’t do that. We gotta be. I said, no, what you need to do is you need to design this kind of reconciliation system. So if a transaction goes through the old system, you push it through the new system.

And if it goes through the new system, you push it through the old system. And then at the bottom you have some reconciliation as well and so the idea is that it gives you a kind of an incremental goal life strategy cuz what you can do is you can say you can just open the top a little bit and just put a little bit of your market into this new system and you’ll see some problems and you’ll fix those problems.

And then you say, oh how confident are we feeling now about adding more people to this and so you open the top a bit more and so more stuff is going into the new system and we find some discrepancies. We reconcile the old system. It’s a lot of extra work, don’t get me wrong. But it’s very good at reducing the risk of the goal life.

Anyway, in that situation, within four months, I actually left after that recommendation. But they followed my advice and within four months it was live across the whole country. They actually decommissioned the old system and it was unlike previous attempts at replacing that system before where they were left, you know, when you tried to put in a new system and you try to replace the old system and then it doesn’t really quite work. So you end up with two systems. And so they were worried, that’s why they had a big bang approach. They wanted to get rid of the old systems. But with this approach, they did get rid of the old systems it’s called the strangler pattern.

So maybe you should be thinking less about how do you measure value and maybe you need to be thinking more about how do you reduce the risk with the deployment and how can you actually deliver any value in the shorter terms, you can follow a trajectory, like the agile one, rather than the kind of Waterfall pattern here, which is where you get nothing for a long time.

And then it eventually goes up. So keep feeding through your questions to me. Thank you so much for that question.

So just a reminder please donate to agile with Ukraine at agilewithUkraine.com. It’s very good cause to raise funding for life saving equipment, humanitarian and medical help, and I wish you a good day.

Thank you.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

How do you measure Value in Scrum? Part 1
Thinkers360
June 14, 2022

How do I measure value for a major IT infrastructure piece of work? How do I measure value? Before I even get into, how do I measure value? What is value? A lot of people struggle with this. I wrote an article about this here, what is value really?

I think one of the reasons why the world is in the way it is, is because we over-indexed on a couple of meanings for that.

Organizational Value

One of them being organizational values where maybe you’re trying to protect the reputation of the company or trying to protect the revenue that you have or protect whatever value that you have.

Organizational, from the point of view of protecting the organization’s interests, maybe protecting the reputation of the company, maybe reducing costs, things like that. That’s quite a common interpretation of value.

We’re saving some money or something like that.

Market Value

Then there’s market value, which is where a customer, end-user interacts with our product or service and they get something there, we see a change in behavior. They can do something more easily. They complete a task more easily.

They can do it in less, with less steps and so on. There’s less friction. It’s easier to do all these kind of things.

Societal Value

And then there’s societal value, an example of which for me, would be sustainability. Have we reduced our carbon footprint? Have we reduced our nuclear footprint?Have we reduced our plastic footprint?

Plastics seem to be even more damaging than the climate crisis. What are we doing around that area? Or it could be around a risk reduction, reducing risk. Maybe we’ve got a technical mess left behind this. Maybe the product looks all nice, but it’s just hanging together by a string but a lot of people don’t know that. It could be failure demand. Maybe we delivered something and we didn’t do something right for the customer. Some piece of work went live and then the call center was just rammed with complaints and some person left the building with a major bonus having delivered on time and on budget, but we just messed up the call centers and maybe 80, 90% of our calls at the call centers are complaints.

Risk reduction could also be the cost of not doing something. If we don’t do this, then something bad might happen kind of thing. And a lot of the time we don’t know when that bad thing might happen. It’s intangible really. We can’t really say when it will happen.We know that at some point it might happen.

Learning Value

A kind of a more mature lens at value as well would be, say we have some learning, we learn something about one of these above and there’s value also in learning. And I would argue that learning is the first citizen. A lot of the time we don’t actually know for sure if we will deliver this value.

And so sometimes you can run some experiments to discover do we have the capability to harvest that value? And so that’s for me, what value is. I had a case where I could just put a monetary value on something and we didn’t use it. We didn’t use it because at the time we were using some app and I think we had a million downloads or something like that, of the app.

And we could really have zoned in on users of the app and get them to convert, redeem some offer, tailored or something like that. And then we’d see the money. We could literally see the sales going up as the offers were being consumed on the app, but we decided not to use sales as the measure of value because we wanted 50 million people downloading the app, 50 million people using the app.

And what’s the point in milking the 1 million people who downloaded the app already when we could actually have done something much, much bigger. Even then we didn’t use money so in fact, I never have used money. So really value is relative. It’s not exact. We don’t know what we’re gonna get.

And if you have a backlog, for example, you’ve got different items in your backlog and you think some things are more valuable than others. It’s relative. We have an idea that some things might be more available than others, but there was a famous case study by Maersk Cargo called Black Swan farming, where they discovered that some items were hundreds or thousands of times more valuable than others, but they only found out after they went live. So they talked about cost of delay and all that. But what I picked out of that paper was you actually don’t know how valuable something is until you actually go live. So maybe you need to do some small little bets.

It’s tiny little bets on each to see where the money is. So instead of going into a casino and putting all your money on the first four tables, which is what a lot of people do in MVP, minimum viable product, which would mean the crappiest product in the time. I don’t use that term anymore.

I prefer what’s the smallest thing we can do, the smallest thing we can do, and the next most important thing. So instead of putting all your money in the first four tables in the casino, maybe we could put money on 10 tables and maybe all the actions on table number nine, actually.

So different ways of understanding value, market value, organizational value, societal value, risk reduction, or learning, and it’s relative. But when do you reap that value?

Reaping the value

You only reap that value when you release, when you give whatever you have to customers to give feedback. And often people draw a graph over time and they might have, a value in the vertical axis and maybe time on the horizontal axis.

And when you start with an agile piece of work even if you’re using something like scrum, where you’re going in, there’s some kind of sprint cycle and you’re trying to release some product at the end of that cycle and so on. We call it the increment and that increment gets bigger and so on.

Even if you’re doing that, in my opinion, when you start doing scrum unless you’re like a bunch of Navy seals or something where you can just click together and everything’s just perfect as soon as you start, most of the time, we just suck in the first sprint. Maybe for the first two months, we suck and there’s a change curve that people are probably familiar with as well.

When you start, you try something different, a lot of the time things get worse. You can reduce how much worse it gets. But typically gets worse, in my experience, it can take two months for the performance of the team to come back up and then you really get into a nice trajectory and you leave the other people behind. So when I start with the value I would argue that value would go up a little bit in the early sprint, but it wouldn’t be stellar. It wouldn’t be going upright, cuz we’re doing lots of learning about each other. We’re learning more about the vision and the product and what we’re trying to achieve. And if we’re having goal orientation, hopefully there’s some kind of North Star that we’re striving for at the end of every sprint kind of thing.

And going for some overall kind of North Star that we’re striving for. Hopefully we’re doing that. And then we got some goal orientation, but even with all of that in the first couple of sprints, maybe we don’t deliver as much value as we would hope. You only get value when you release and you might find out that the value is negative.

You find out that you’ve actually made things worse. Don’t forget that. I really admired a guy once, who was in one of my leadership classes. I don’t recommend this by the way, but he said, John I take things out of production. I said, what do you mean you take things out of production?

He says, yeah, they’re just putting rubbish in out, I said what happens if they notice? He says they rarely notice. And if they do, I just say, oh, sorry, that was a mistake. And then they put it back in. So he understood actually that a lot of the time we make things worse, you add more bugs and you add more, just makes it more messy and so on.

But most of us, hopefully we deliver more useful stuff as we go on. Although we do know from lots of studies, that two thirds of what we build, unless we do discover to deliver, which I wrote about here.

If we just deliver stuff like robotically from the backlog, two thirds of those items are rarely or never used.

So the man actually is probably not in a bad track, not sure I recommend it though. Probably the better way would be to use discovery, to figure out the stuff you should never build, do experiments. But let’s say the team is they’re delivering value because they, they’re releasing something, and then things get better and then they deliver more value and you can release during the sprint as well remember? You don’t have to wait until the end of the sprint. Actually, I hope what will happen is you deliver a bit of value during the sprint and then you actually have some feedback as well at the sprint review. And so we can course correct. We’re not just like relying on the opinions of the people, the stakeholders inside the building. We’re actually, we’re talking to customers. How about that? And we’re looking at the analytics, if it’s software, for example, or maybe there’s no analytics as well. If it’s non-software you can still tell how the product is doing and yes, you can run more experiments and just find out what’s going on.

You can do interviews, you can just talk to them, pick up the phone. And so with approaches like Scrum for example, the delivery of real value increases over time. Do we know exactly what it is? No, it’s relative for me. There are techniques but I don’t make up money. It’s just relative really.

Part 2 of this blog is now available.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

Trust and its impact on the definition of done in scrum
Thinkers360
May 31, 2022

Why is our definition of done so long?

I don’t like to call the definition of done the checklist for how we do things around here. I used to say that because you might be including every single little thing in your process when you do that, but does it have the essential elements of how do we know that this work is done?

Why is our definition of done so long? In some cases, actually, it’s not long at all. My most common experience is that when I ask people what’s in their definition of done they say we met the acceptance criteria. There’s a lot more to done than just meeting the acceptance criteria. This typically happens when there’s a kind of a traditional approach to delivery and scrum has been wrapped inside that approach. I often call it water scrum fall and in waterfall, it’s very professional, it’s very good but it doesn’t have a thing called a definition of done. So this concept is alien to waterfall.

When people think of done, they think, oh, we just met the acceptance criteria. We just did what our customer is looking for. But we might be lacking transparency if we don’t have additional criteria there. What I often see as well is almost the opposite of that, where there’s too much in the definition of done and I did this in the past myself as well in a large bank where I with others created an organizational definition of done, which was then inherited by the teams as a minimum that they would not have to rethink how to comply with financial regulations and so on. We thought that was a good idea but what that resulted in was essentially we had a very detailed definition of done and it was so detailed that really people didn’t remember what was on it. It probably was put on a confluence page or metaphorically stuck in a drawer where people forgot about it.

I often did mini audits if you like across groups of say 400 people, just checking in, do you even know the depth of what the definition of done, do you respect it? Do you continually improve it? And I was told people improve it, but actually they didn’t even know what it was.

So how can you improve your definition of done if you don’t even know what the one is that you have, and if you don’t even respect it.

There’s no basis for continuous improvement in scrum at least if you’re not using your definition of done, but while we might want to be careful about making sure that people haven’t forgotten anything, it does say something about us when we do have a very detailed definition of done. Imagine a list that had 30 items on it. What does that say about what’s going on in that environment? And I would put it to you that what it says is that there’s a lack of trust. It typically happens when maybe there are some suppliers involved.

It might be nothing to do with the suppliers. And I’m not saying it’s their fault, but there’s this kind of organizational lack of trust in other people, it could be other teams and it could be at other sites. But essentially it comes down to lack of trust and it always begs the question where does the definition of done end and where does waterfall begin? We often hear people complaining about a definition of ready as a gate, you can’t bring it in cause it’s not ready, which is not a very scrummy approach. You still have a last chance to sort things out during sprint planning.

Not a very scrummy approach.

But the definition of done, when it’s a really long detailed list, it’s likely that people won’t be complying with it. You’ve lost the plot then, people will not understand why should they do all these things? It’s just too much. So what ends up happening is because there’s too much, nothing happens.

What would happen if we had higher trust in the system? And what impact would that have on the definition of done? So what I often do is a liberating structure called critical uncertainties, and you could pick any two dimensions of a problem. Say on the horizontal axis, I would have the level of trust. So on the left-hand side, I might have low trust and on the right-hand side I might have high trust and the vertical line would be to do with the definition of done the minimum would be you had one, a clear, but basic definition of done, not no definition of scrum, in scrum you have a definition of done, that’s it.

A basic but clear definition of done at the bottom and at the top a very detailed, definition of done. And so you draw the vertical line, you draw the horizontal line, you end up with four quadrants. You end up with a situation where we have low trust and a very detailed definition of done.

We’ve got low trust and a very basic definition of done. We’ve got high trust, very basic definition of done but clear and high trust, a very detailed definition of done, but clear, and what you can do with critical uncertainties, you can ask people, how would you think people would be behaving in those quadrants?

So for example, if you had low trust and a basic, but clear definition of done, actually things could fall between the cracks because there’s no trust. Maybe they won’t, maybe everything will be fine. Maybe we will actually earn trust, but what could happen? Things could fall between the cracks.

It becomes apparent to people and reinforces that sometimes we have a detailed definition of done because we don’t have enough trust.

And then you go to the high trust side and say, what would happen? What kind of behaviors would you see if you had high trust and a clear, but basic definition of done? And they say nice things, it’d be lovely.

What would happen if you had a very detailed definition of done with high trust?

It might actually erode trust. And so for me, it all comes back to trust then. So if you have high trust, you don’t need to have a very detailed definition of done I would put to you. How do you increase trust?

Let’s come back to the scrum values for a start. In scrum, we’ve got the five scrum values. I use the mnemonic FOCCR. It’s funny. Meet the Fockers then change the K to a C. Focus, openness, courage, commitment, and respect. Have the scrum team and its stakeholders really committed to those scrum values and if they’re really striving to improve on those, trust should increase. Trust is also at the base of the triangle of the five dysfunctions of a team. If you don’t have trust there are lots of things that don’t happen.

So how do you increase trust? I guess is the question and I don’t have all the answers, but I think one of the things is, might be no harm now and again, to do a sprint review. How are we doing against the scrum values? How are we doing against the three pillars of scrum as well? Transparency, inspection, and adaptation. How transparent are we? Are people clear on what’s actually really happening? By looking at the three artifacts, the product backlog, the sprint backlog and the increment, but also I would refer back to Richard Hackman’s work as well, because he was an expert on teams.

He studied teams in the US federal agencies, and it’s not all about us singing songs all around the campfire and everybody’s happy. It’s a two-way street really. To increase trust, we also need to deliver, we need to deliver ideally what we said, we’d deliver in the spring goal.

That’s what we commit to in scrum we commit to delivering the work from the spring goal. And so I think it’s a two-way street. I think we need to be looking at how we’re behaving with each other. We need to be striving to improve how we’re doing on the scrum values and we need to be delivering. And it’s not true in my opinion, that we need to wait for the team to be happy and we need to build up trust before the team can deliver. You might not have a team for very long if that’s your approach because the team might never deliver. And we do need to face some reality.

Sometimes when we’re being open, we need to have the courage to say the things that need to be sorted.

So how do we use definition of done more efficiently at sprint planning?

So really the definition of done should already be there before you go into sprint planning. A lot of people kind of get confused that the best place to review the definition of done is actually at the sprint retrospective. But people say, hang on the retrospective is at the end of the sprint, what do we do before we start the first sprint?

It doesn’t say this in the scrum guide. My personal opinion is when I start up with a team, we elaborate. What’s the vision for the product. If there’s a vision, what’s the product goal. Let me try it. I might use a story map to break down the product goal into sub goals, into high-level items, into more detailed items.

And you end up with the product backlog on the wall. I would also encourage the team to create their definition of done before they start their first sprint planning and I will write another blog on sizing, so I won’t get too much into sizing, but when you’re looking into can we do this item in the sprint?

Do we think we’re comfortable about bringing this item in? You can use the definition of done as your reference point if you’d like to say actually to get this done, we have to do all these things. Do we really think that we can comfortably get that done within the sprint? How comfortable do we feel about that?

The mistake that a lot of teams make is they don’t refer to their definition of done at all. So then surprise, at the end of the sprint, they don’t have a lot of work done because actually they didn’t even know what done actually meant. I would use the definition of done as a reference point for planning and really, if you want to improve how the team uses the definition of done, I would say, even though you can have an organizational definition of done, and even though the intent behind that is to ensure that we don’t forget things. Be careful. I’m thinking with one of my clients at the moment of moving away from that kind of a model and moving more to a situation where the teams, the people in the teams are deciding what done means.

If multiple teams are working on the same product, they need to work with each other to figure that out, but let them figure it out. And then let’s together try to figure out a way, how can we increase trust so that we don’t need to have such a detailed definition of done so that we do comply with our definition of done and that then gives us a basis for continuous improvement. The light bulb moment here is that when we ask teams to improve their definition of done, a lot of people think, oh, I have to add more items to my definition of done, I have to do even more things.

Maybe if you improve trust maybe there’ll be fewer items in your definition of done. 

See blog

Tags: Agile, Leadership, Management

In scrum who is responsible for engaging the stakeholders?
Thinkers360
May 23, 2022

The buck stops with the product owner. There's three accountabilities in scrum:

  • the product owner,
  • the scrum master and
  • developers.

I guess we would really want the scrum master and the developers to be doing some of that stakeholder engagement.

For example, during the sprint, I hope the developers have been introduced to the customers and end-users, so they actually refine what needs to be done. What was the thing you wanted again, you asked us six months ago and we're just starting to work on it now. What problem are you really trying to solve? Oh, that's what you try and do. That's not what we understood. So trying to get a common understanding of what's required.

 

I would expect developers to be talking to customers and end users and not the product owner kind of like being the proxy, kind of conduit between the developers and the customers. The product owner is ultimately on the hook for customers, end users, but also compliance stakeholders for example, maybe there's some suppliers that you're interacting with. Maybe there's other teams that we depend on and we need to interact with those. And there's the whole organization, of course, but the scrum master can help with a lot of this. For example, a scrum master is a change agent and should be able to work with other teams and maybe negotiate ways of working with those other teams.

 

They might not be working in a scrum fashion, but we can't just arrive saying we use a scrum, so you need to give us this tomorrow. They have their own lead times have their own ways of working. We need to be respectful of other people. And so the scrum master can interact with those people. 

 

A decent scrum master should be able to negotiate on your behalf as well as the product owner in terms of how do we demonstrate compliance in this agile world? Can we see each other every month? And can I ask you two questions? Are you happy? Are you engaged? And if the answer to either of those two questions is no then maybe we need to talk more during the sprint.

 

But coming back to who's ultimately on the hook, it really is down on the product owner. And then I hope there would be a very good discussion within the team about what can the scrum master take away in terms of 

responsibility there and what can the developers do? And how can we make sure that the product owner is effectively connected with the stakeholders that she needs to be connected to, to such an extent that we're kind of keeping an eye on the politics if you like in a positive way where the optics we might be doing very well as a scrum team, but if we're not being perceived to be doing well, that's important. So what are the expectations of these stakeholders? Do we need to help them embrace uncertainty?

Does the scrum master need to help them to understand uncertainty? And that sometimes we don't know when it will be done. So we need to use some regular forecasting to kind of give them some kind of information, still saying, we'll give you a better forecast next week. I think if there's one job I really want the product owner to be doing is to be really connecting properly with stakeholders.

I don't want them writing user stories. I don't want them writing product backlog items. I don't want them kind of stuck in with a team every single day, unless it's a really technical product or so on. The product owner has other things to do as well in terms of product management, commercial stuff, pricing, and so on, marketing.

And unless that stuff is all part of what the work is done on the scrum team product owner is going to be doing lots of other stuff. And so I hope there's some really healthy discussions within the scrum team about how do we deal with all these stakeholders and stakeholder mapping is one of the techniques that you can use.

So who's on the hook really? Ultimately the product owner.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Project Management

Can scrum and agility be scaled and what’s the best way to do it?
Thinkers360
April 29, 2022

LeSS — Large Scale Scrum

So if you just look at LeSS, if I was to look at one slogan for it, if you like, it’s one product backlog with a learning focus, LeSS stands for large scale scrum with a little ‘e’ in the middle. As for adaptive product groups, I mean, it’s not what agility is all about, adapting to what’s going on in the market but so many companies really lost their way and they think it’s better, faster, cheaper, but LeSS is about adaptive product groups, it’s about learning and they’ve got real peer-reviewed case studies. It’s very difficult to get a case study published there. It’s like really difficult and I’ve tried five times, I’m still not there.

I have applied LeSS principles in many places but I’ve struggled to implement it. So it’s very difficult to implement. But it’s got this nice blend of principles and rules and, the idea of self designing teams, you don’t have to use self designing teams. You can evolve the whole group. That’s another approach. If you do, you have self designing teams that kind of go with flipping the system, 50 people at a time, it’s an expression flip the system, you have kind of informed consent, bringing maybe 50 people through, get them all trained up, all that kind of thing. You might find out at the end of the training that maybe only 35 of those people actually want to be part of it. And because LeSS is based on volunteering, so there’s no problem there. The 15, you stay where you are, we’ll treat you (your work) as a dependency, even if we desperately need you, because we prefer people who are in there to really want to do this.

LeSS is about simplifying by stripping complicatedness away.

So if you see some process that’s meh , it’s about stripping those away. And actually what’s really nice about LeSS, ‘manager’ is an optional role. And if you have them, the view is that they’re more impactful than scrum masters in removing impediments and then simplifying, which I quite like.

In LeSS, they use communities as such to preserve the legacy organization. That’s probably not the right way to say, but you don’t want to throw out the baby with the bath water. If you had an analysis group, an architecture group, development group, testing group, maybe you’d have communities for those , so they still have a place to go if you like to talk about those kind of concerns. Even if you decide not to do LeSS, my opinion is it’s a very good thing to learn, to understand what maybe mistakes you could avoid. I read the three books and I went to Bas Vodde’s class a few years ago and my head was exploding. It was a fantastic workshop and I was glad to see someone else had the same comments this week, someone else who went to his training in Manchester.

I actually wrote a blog post, 50 light bulb moments, five zero, after training, with Bas Vodde. It’s amazing. But it does rely on long-term co-located, multidisciplinary, end to end, what I call a slice of cake teams.

I think the whole feature team thing has become misunderstood. So I talk about layer of cake teams, like front-end, middleware back-end and slice of cake teams kind of cutting down through that. So LeSS demands if you like that you have cake teams so It’s a big step.

You can evolve towards it. You could treat the framework as an evolution, and then use the principles to guide you. That’s what I do. But you can also use it as a framework and then use that as your starting point to move along and always using the principles to move forward. Very good thing to do, to understand maybe what most people fall into, growing product owners like flowers like I mentioned earlier

Disciplined Agile

Then there’s disciplined agile, which I’m only including, because it’s so well-known, but I really think it’s rubbish. It’s ‘practical’ and in the books I was disappointed with the author’s ‘but in the real world’, ‘but in the real world’ and all this kind of stuff, making excuses almost everywhere, all over the book about why you can’t be agile and why you can’t be lean. It’s a buffet so pick what you want and guideline oriented. And what I noticed when I was working in a major oil company, nearly 10 years ago when I was an enterprise agile coach, they’re writing kind of a guide for how we could implement agility in the whole company. I realized that two thirds of people need rules. So disciplined agile is a set of guidelines so you can just basically drive a truck through it.

Drive by, is what I would say that’s my personal opinion about disciplined agile, it is owned by PMI now, which is the only reason why I’m including it because PMI is a huge organization, but I would quite honestly just drive by disciplined agile. Some good ideas in there but so compromised, it’s not useful in my opinion.

Scrum at Scale

Then there’s scrum at scale. One of the things I like about scrum with scale is it’s got an exec scrum team. So the executive team uses scrum and they’ve got this how cycles, so they do have product owners growing like flowers. So we got product owner, we got chief product owner, chief chief product owner and all this kind of thing.

And it’s got a how cycle or a prioritization refinement, the what cycle. And then the how cycle is the scrum masters. Then you got scrum of scrum masters, scrum with scrum of scrum masters master and so on. And then there is eventually this kind of executive action team as well, where they try to remove impediments.

So it’s really nice from the point of view of getting problems fixed. What I don’t like about it is that it just, it’s the ‘piss in the pants’ solution that I talked about earlier. It’s scrum-ish, which is surprising because Jeff Sutherland as co-author, of the scrum guide it does rely on a product owner per team and hierarchy of those. And interestingly Henrik Kniberg, a very respected guy. He says that the original Spotify video, that’s an instance of scrum at scale. It surprised me. I really like Henrik’s work. Take that at face value.

SAFe — Scaled Agile Framework

Then there’s SAFe, scaled agile framework. I’m not a fan of SAFe, I’m not a fan of scrum with scale either as you probably picked up, but some of these approaches are useful when the organization just, they’re just so far away from lean agile that some people say you can use it as a Trojan horse and you can get started and so on.

But I used to think that, I don’t think that anymore. It’s very popular. It’s build-out, it’s got everything in there. It’s got lean agile in a box, which I don’t mean in a complimentary way. It relies heavily on training and there’s a real low barrier to entry for most trainers so you could have been doing program management all your life. And then you go on a four day class and now you can teach the class as well. Even though you might not have that much agile experience, you do have to pass a test to be fair and all that. You could basically reinvent yourself. If you are going to use SAFe, I would say, there are some very good people I respect in the SAFe space.

So use someone that is highly recommended, maybe there’s some SPC who’s highly recommended or an SPC trainer. They’re like the top gun if you like of the SAFe community and I’ve seen some very good people going through there. So try to use really good practitioners. It’s got different scales, so you’ve got the essential version and there’s the large solution, there’s portfolio and there’s the full solution, I believe.

And they keep updating, which is nice. So they’re being agile about the framework. I’m just not a fan of it. And if a company asks me to use it, I just run, I ask someone else that I respect to go in and do it instead. It just tramples on all of my values really and a really corrupt scrum as well.

Nexus

Then there is nexus. So nexus is probably the simplest pattern of them all. And I believe it is culture agnostic, and it’s almost method agnostic.

I’ve used this in a variety of cultures, even cultures where it’s very difficult to be agile let’s put it that way. It’s designed to deal with layer of cake teams, and let’s be honest, most teams in the world are layer of cake teams. It’s simple. It’s flexible. It’s like LeSS’ little sibling.

I compared nexus and LeSS, a few years ago and Bas, he said nexus is like LeSS’ little brother, which is actually a compliment because before that wouldn’t have been said. And it’s a big improvement on scrum of scrums. So each event in nexus has a purpose, so there’s nexus sprint, the nexus daily scrum, the nexus sprint review, the nexus sprint retrospective. Unlike scrum of scrums where, people turn up and they don’t know why they’re there, are they for impediments or for dependencies? Are they for status reporting, even who goes like the different patterns disagree on who should go.

The decent patterns in my opinion, would send people who are doing the work. We call those people developers in scrum. That doesn’t mean they’re software developers. We just call them developers in scrum, but you could use nexus for Kanban teams. That was in my first case study back in 2015, just a couple of months after it came out, I had Kanban lean startup and the scrum teams using the nexus patterns.

It’s a very nice pattern. And you can evolve away to slice of cake teams over time. There’s also nexus plus because the downside of nexus is it only goes up to 9 teams. But you could have a nexus plus integration team. So a nexus of a Nexus kind of thing.

And so you’d have a nexus for each work stream, and then you’d have nexus plus integration team integrating between those, what I love about nexus , one product backlog, one product owner. It doesn’t grow product owners like flowers. So far the patterns I’ve been talking about, I’d be looking at either LeSS or nexus as a kind of the North star, if you like probably LeSS as the North star. And then Nexus maybe as a way of getting there.

Flight Levels

There’s another pattern called flight levels, which has been around for a while, but it’s been gathering steam really in the last few years. And the idea is that you have like a flight level one, flight level two, flight level three.

And so the flight level one would be like your operational boards if you like. You could be doing scrum, you could be doing Kanban, you could be just doing work or whatever, and your teams will have whatever boards they have. But I’m not sure if you’ve noticed that when teams are working together on a product, sometimes there’s a kind of a dependency chain. There’s boards that link to each other and things like that, or maybe they don’t link to each other, maybe that’s the problem.

This is all my personal opinion.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

Why adding Lean UX to Scrum with Kanban is integral to the future of agile?
Thinkers360
April 04, 2022

In a previous article, I wrote about how Scrum with Kanban can help deal with complex problems.

Scrum with Kanban helps people discover and deliver outcomes faster, whether related to the customer, organization or reducing risk. Adding Lean UX techniques to Scrum with Kanban allows teams to discover and address unmet customer needs, reduce stress, and cope with unpredictability.

Teams incorporating Scrum with Kanban already have a significant advantage regarding delivering value on a regular cadence. The signaling systems built into Scrum with Kanban make where work is getting stuck visible, giving Scrum Teams an opportunity and clear direction for improving the system in which they operate.

Using Scrum with Kanban, a workflow can have several cycle times, including end-to-end customer cycle time and time-in-process. By monitoring throughput, Scrum Teams can prioritize within their capacity. By actively managing work item age, they can shorten feedback loops and increase throughput.

So, what does Lean UX add to these advantages? It helps make sure we’re delivering what we should be delivering. 

Product development is becoming increasingly complex with the emergence of 5G, AI, the metaverse, and other quickly evolving technology landscapes. One result is that it’s easier than ever to misunderstand or misinterpret customers' needs amid many new potential product options. That reality alone is reason enough to integrate Lean UX techniques into a Scrum with Kanban approach.

I think of Lean UX as a strategy for maintaining humility about our product development ideas. We get it wrong most of the time. A recurring Standish Group report, the CHAOS report, says two-thirds of features are rarely or never used. Think of the expense of all of these wasted products and features.

 

The Lean UX canvas is an indispensable tool that aids the discovery of product/market fit. With the canvas, product backlog refinement produces Product Backlog items for UX research, design, interviews, and experiments to test our assumptions about the business problem, the customer/end-user, and their problems/jobs-to-be-done and solutions. Alternatively, there is an option to blend UX/non-UX Product Backlog items in the refinement process.

 

Box 1 frames the business problem to be solved; one could use the business problem template, the elevator pitch template, or free format. Box 2 is specific about the percentage or numeric improvement achieved if the problem was solved; the pirate metrics AARRR (#acquisitions, #activations, $revenue, %retention, #referrals) metrics are often used. Box 2 metrics are about what's better for the organization with the customer/end-user in mind.

 

Box 3 is about our best guess on who might be interacting with the problem we’re trying to solve. Box 4 is about the observable outcomes and longer-term benefits for the people from box 3 - at least our best guess. Customers/end-users should be at the heart of product management.  

 

It’s only when one gets to box five that solution possibilities are considered. We do, after all, want to avoid looking at the problem through the aperture of a solution.

 

Box 6 clicks together hypotheses from the assumptions from boxes 1-5; it’s as easy as clicking together Lego bricks. 

 

We believe that [a specific business outcome from box 2]

will be achieved if [a specific user from box 3]

attains [specific outcomes & benefits from box 4]

with [a specific feature from box 5].

 

Box 7 is about figuring out the assumption that if wrong could lead to catastrophic failure. We want to tease that out in box 7, and then in box 8, what experiment/research/interview(s) could we do in 30 minutes, one day, one month, one month to learn the next most important thing.

 

Lean UX proposes data-informed decision making; in practice, a mixture between looking at analytics and talking to customers and end-users. 

 

Lean UX practitioners learn humility fast. Our best guesses are usually wrong and pivot or stop. If we’re lucky, we persevere. I love Lean UX because we discover we should not build most of our ideas, and we discover better ideas or stop wasting money.

Scrum with Kanban combined with Lean UX design techniques improves customer satisfaction and time-to-market and allows experimentation to address unmet needs. 

Apart from delivering more value, Lean UX combining Scrum with Kanban provides the foundation for more rewarding work. Up-and-coming workers are demanding more work-life balance and professional satisfaction. Using Scrum with Kanban, people estimate less, learn/build more, and make problems immediately visible resulting in a more relaxed, satisfying work environment. Because trust often increases with more effective, efficient, and predictable delivery, Scrum with Kanban reduces team drama through better focus and slack. Slack allows people to think and be ready for the unexpected.

The future of agile includes Scrum with Kanban and UX. This winning combination allows us to focus more, learn more, finish more, collaborate more, and see the bigger picture. It enables us to set better customer expectations, more often improving overall satisfaction.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Lean Startup

How Kanban helps people solve complex problems
Thinkers360
March 31, 2022

Kanban is a strategy for optimizing the flow of value through a process that uses a visual, pull-based system. It’s suited to complex problems because it helps deal with uncertainty, a central feature of complex professional knowledge work. Let’s explore the Kanban practices and its other aspects and how they apply.

 

DEFINING AND VISUALIZING WORKFLOW

Kanban uses system members to refer to the people working in tandem towards a goal. Those folks can be a team, group, crew, or individuals. Regardless, the first task is to define the workflow (DoW), which makes explicit what units of value to work on and how system members will manage them from start to finish.

The term kanban essentially means visual signal. The Kanban Guide gives us a structure for optimizing signaling to see any hiccups in our flow. We visualize the workflow via a Kanban board, which can include more than one workflow, if necessary. 

While Kanban doesn’t require collaboration, its practices foster working together, which is ideal for complex work. Summoning the collective wisdom of system members to define the work and the process of starting and finishing brings a kind of order and clarity to the environment. 

 

ACTIVELY MANAGING ITEMS IN A WORKFLOW

Kanban’s second practice is actively managing items in a workflow.  This practice has system members examine the signals we’ve outlined above and address any issues in the workflow. We control how much work to bring into the workflow, spot and manage bottlenecks, and ensure work items don’t age needlessly. We examine impediments to work that appear to be stuck.

By regularly reviewing these signals, we avoid becoming overwhelmed and continually refresh our thinking and approach, allowing us to adapt to emerging realities and new knowledge. 

 

IMPROVING THE WORKFLOW

Kanban’s third practice is improving the workflow where system members continuously tweak their workflow to achieve a better balance of effectiveness, efficiency, and predictability.  System members can review and change the definition of the workflow at any time, including adding or removing columns. Changes can be small and incremental or large-scale if the situation warrants. 

For example, when I worked in the marketing department of a fast-moving consumer goods company, I noticed that we were experiencing a bottleneck in our work but had no idea where it was in the system because we lacked visual signals. I suggested to the team that we create a swimlane on our board per dependency partner so we could see where things were getting hung up. After this change, we resolved the workflow issue with the department involved. 

There is always a bottleneck in complex work; we would have unlimited capacity if there weren’t. Let’s not be too hard on people. Finding bottlenecks isn’t about blame.

Let’s create a definition of workflow (DoW) that works for the Kanban system members without even a hint of “big brother is watching.” I would argue that the Kanban board must provide value to the system members themselves; if there’s value to the “higher-ups,” it’s a bonus. Members are often aware of the bigger system within which they operate, and they usually see sense in some kind of (self-managed) coordination and strategic workflow(s) at higher levels. 

Regular reviews of the workflow are recommended when dealing with complexity, either event-based or in a rhythm.

 

KANBAN IS COMPATIBLE WITH OTHER FRAMEWORKS

While it’s critical to maintain the integrity of the Kanban practices and measures regardless of environment, integrating Kanban with other approaches is possible and likely advisable. Combining Kanban with Scrum and Lean UX, for example, works well when the type of solution required for the need is unclear. Kanban helps us improve effectiveness, efficiency, and predictability, while Scrum and Lean UX allow us to discover to deliver when we don’t have enough data to inform us of what solution would meet the customer’s needs best.  

 

ALL LEVELS OF APPLICABILITY

The beauty of Kanban is that we can use it at all levels as part of a strategy to optimize value delivery. 

Kanban is compatible with many types of knowledge work, including marketing, legal, people & culture, finance, and software. In my opinion, one would be hard-pressed to identify a sector that Kanban hasn’t touched. 

Whether your team uses a Scrum or Kanban board or just “does work,” it’s crucial to coordinate the work across value streams, products, services, or projects. Using an aggregate collaboration Kanban board can help with governing delivery and dependencies. At the top level, this enables executives to be more in tune with how injecting new work fits the in-progress strategy and its impact on workflow.

In these times, value is not only about the organization, the customer, and the end-user; it is also about sustainability, the reduction of risk, and learning. Kanban is useful for achieving value in all of these areas.

 

CONCLUSION

A characteristic of complex work is that the way forward involves a lot of unknowns that we must adapt to and address as they become known. Kanban’s practices and measures help us to manage variables and workflow and use data for better decision-making in the face of uncertainty. 

See blog

Tags: Agile, Change Management, Management

How can Scrum with Kanban help people solve complex problems?
Thinkers360
March 22, 2022

Complexity often requires collaboration, not necessarily between teams, but between groups, crews, or individuals. Scrum already helps teams deal with complexity, so what does Kanban bring to the mix?

Scrum with Kanban includes a definition of workflow, four practices, and four measures. The first practice is visualization of the workflow. The visualization of that workflow is essentially the Kanban board. 

 

There is so much in the definition of workflow that can help make sense of complexity. The name Kanban roughly means visual signal. The Kanban Guide For Scrum Teams helps us optimize signaling to see what we need to do to help our work flow.

 

Focusing on the following allows us to navigate complexity more easily: 

  • What active work we should focus on or bring in today 
  • How much work we’re comfortable doing at the same time 
  • Our aspiration for more predictability
  • Visualizing:
    • relatively aged work
    • blocked work
    • dependencies, including those neither aligned nor acknowledged 

 

The 2nd practice of limiting work in progress (WIP) tightens the Scrum Team’s focus, so they get the Product Backlog items to Done sooner, which allows for slack time for thinking and unplanned eventualities. When the Scrum Team releases sooner, feedback loops also get tighter resulting in a quicker inspection of feedback and adaptation.

 

 

The 3rd practice of active management of work items in progress is about the Scrum Team addressing the above signals. By reviewing what the Developers need to work on together today, they continually refresh their thinking to address the complexity they’re facing.

 

 

The 4th practice is inspecting and adapting the team’s definition of workflow. The Scrum Team can change the definition of workflow at any time, including which columns on the Kanban board to add or remove. However, the Scrum Team needs to strike a balance between allowing the system to settle to observe trend changes following a policy change and adapting to the current reality by making multiple changes in the definition of workflow.

 

 

Scrum events increase the number of opportunities to step back to thoughtfully review what’s going on, which helps avoid execution bias. Using Kanban’s flow-based perspective and metrics as part of the Scrum events strengthens the team’s empirical approach. 

 

In Sprint Planning, teams can use throughput or Monte Carlo probabilistic forecasting to guide selecting the number of items they can reasonably get Done in a Sprint. In the Daily Scrum, a review of blockers and relative work item aging can help manage items in progress towards the Sprint Goal.

 

I recommend using Monte Carlo probabilistic forecasting in the Sprint Review as well. The tool can help manage expectations with its caveat that we’ll have a more accurate forecast next week/Sprint/month. Knowing that we are up against it to meet a deadline early on is often enough to course correct or simplify achieving the outcomes. 

 

 

The Scrum Team should strive for a range of opinions and views on what the customer data is saying; doing so improves fresh thinking, a vital tool for complex work. Try to avoid groupthink; invite to the Sprint Review people who constructively bring different perspectives.

 

The Sprint Retrospective encourages the Scrum Team to assess where work is getting stuck, the definition of workflow, and monitor their aspiration for the service level expectations (SLE) against real-world data.

 

 

While Scrum with Kanban is fantastic at improving effectiveness, efficiency, and predictability, deep complexity presents additional challenges.  

 

Quickly evolving, complex environments can encourage advancing ideas that have insufficient evidence to support building them. The “build it, and they will come” approach can be wickedly expensive. Remarkably, the simple act of talking to the customer can help avoid slipping into a fantasyland of what we think they want or need. Using a discover-to-deliver approach aided by Scrum with Kanban and Scrum with UX’s data-informed decision-making help teams stay on the right path.  

 

Remember the treasures that come from simply improving customer service delivery. Using Scrum with Kanban, we can get through Product Backlog items more effectively, efficiently, and predictably to realize those improvements.

 

The beauty of using Kanban to deal with complexity is that we can apply it at all levels as a strategy to optimize the delivery of value. In these times, value is not only about the organization, the customer, and the end-user; it is also about sustainability, the reduction of risk, and learning.

See blog

Tags: Agile, Business Strategy, Change Management

Opportunities

1 Business
Executive Leadership for the 2020s

Location: Virtual, Ireland, UK, continen    Date Available: January 20th, 2020     Fees: 2500 USD pd, 350 USD ph plus t

Submission Date: January 18th, 2020     Service Type: Service Offered

John co-authored, with 30 thought leaders in executive leadership and agility, a strategy for executives in this volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous, and threatened world. It's a journey of workshops, thinking, and practical application.

Respond to this opportunity

Contact John Coleman

Book John Coleman for Speaking

Book a Meeting

Join John Coleman's VIP Club

Media Kit

Share Profile

Contact Info

  Profile

John Coleman


Latest Activity

Latest Opportunities

Latest Member Blogs