Lessons learned from a high performing team. I have been a consultant for some time, having the privilege of working with many great teams and organizations. More than a decade ago I was working with a high performing and empowered team. Challenged with some work in our backlog, we wanted to refactor several objects. Since … Continued
Lack of alignment in an organization causes frustration and slows execution to a crawl. Cross business unit teams with dependencies can cause even greater difficulty in alignment to an organization’s objectives and initiatives. Many frameworks assume that Enterprise Agility is simply Kanban or Scrum scaled across the organization with a communication mechanism added for communicating … Continued
Charles R Swindoll famously wrote “Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.”  While the primary focus of our global response to the pandemic has rightly been people’s health, the lockdown and “economic pause” means we have a changed economic and business landscape. Leaders are now beholden to rise … Continued
Organizations have been propelled into the digital age – not by choice, but by necessity. While some have struggled to adapt, others have excelled as they embrace remote working across teams and locations, while continuing to push their business agenda. Of course, sector and business type play a significant role: organizations that are predominantly office-based … Continued
 In the previous blog post, I discussed a critical consideration in the Requirements Challenge: Knowing the Unknown, as well as a powerful technique to model customer satisfaction and expectations called the Kano Model. In this blog, we will consider the following question: Are all perspectives of the requirements captured in order to achieve consensus and common … Continued
The term DevOps is a combination of two terms: development (Dev) and operations (Ops). This term was created as way of combining software engineering, operations culture, and practices to unify software development and software operations. The primary goal of DevOps is to strongly integrate automation and monitoring at all steps of the software development life … Continued
It’s not unusual for a development team in a “highly regulated environment” to be steered away from agile methodologies and practices because of the perception that they are not a good fit. Preparing to work with auditors in these regulated environments (SOX, CFR, ISO, CMMI, etc.) usually means that an organization relies on well described … Continued
Taylorism was a popular management approach of the early 20th century applied to industrial and manufacturing organizations. Taylorism strived to break down work into small and repeatable tasks that could be taught to people even with limited education. Many companies still apply this approach today. Taylorism is focused on individual performance (i.e. How many widgets … Continued
A quick internet search of “Cargo Cult” will yield some interesting images, such as the image pictured right, which showed up near the top of my search. According to Wikipedia, “A cargo cult is a millenarian movement first described in Melanesia which encompasses a range of practices and occurs in the wake of contact with … Continued