Over the past twenty years the corporate world has seen significant change influenced by digital technology which has revolutionised the way that companies operate. Globalisation has led to increased complexity navigating different markets, each with their own regulatory environments and cultural values, and the pace of external, societal change has led to challenges predicting future trends. Companies have access to more data than ever before, but whilst access has increased

Jira, love it or hate it? Either way, for a lot of organisations it’s necessary; it’s the main tool that development teams use to (1) track their work and for (2) stakeholders to understand whether the company is delivering the right value. If your company is doing both of those things, in a way that’s not burdensome to the teams - and - in a way that is both simple for stakeholders, then you don’t need to read this article. Rate yourself using the Jira20 below and see what

Turns out guacamole is the answer. I’m not entirely sure what the question is (on a side note, I just found out there is a new Douglas Adams book called 42 that comprises a treasure trove of his unreleased personal stash of notebooks, letters and scripts) Anyhoo, Time is an illusion; lunchtime doubly so, so let’s move on. If guacamole is the answer, the question is, obviously, “why - in Agile - do we only improve only one thing at a time. Take Scrum retrospectives, for i

Scrum Masters eh? Do they ever think about what comes next? I don't mean in terms of work, but for yourselves. How long have you been a Scrum Master? More than five years? What comes after Scrum Master? Have you planned for your next step? Are you ready? As a seasoned Scrum Master, you’ve honed your skills, navigated sprint cycles, and facilitated countless ceremonies. But what lies beyond the Scrum board? How can you elevate your impact and propel your career forward?

Clearly from those that have to do it or manage it, the answer is a resounding yes. Is it that clear-cut? Of course not. So let's delve into it, by firstly asking why firms want it. There are a few reasons to want staff time tracking, we’re going to focus on delivery teams but fundamentally the issues are the same: 1. A lack of trust - Management wants a good idea of who’s doing what and is time being spent effectively. Are people doing what they should be? To be honest if

We set Sales teams quota targets, but we don’t tell them they need to close a specific deal on a specific day. We ask marketing teams to commit to driving a certain number of leads within a specific time period, but we don’t tell them that a particular campaign needs to drive those leads. And yet, we ask our product development teams to deliver specific features by specific dates and produce roadmaps of features to give the comfort of ‘certainty’. Feature roadmaps set the wr

I was reading an article the other day from one of the big consultancy firms about organisational culture and why cultural change efforts fail. Honours degrees get you the prestige, but they don’t buy the experience: I swear these big consultancies haven’t ever been on the ground in the workplace because a lot of what is said is nonsense. Their number 1 reason why cultural change fails was “Leaders lack commitment”. I hear similar comments from the agile community when I ask

In my consultancy work I use sporting analogies a lot. My hero growing up was Andre Agassi, and he once said that every tennis match is a life in miniature. Sport mirrors our human experience – the drama of the game, the unpredictable outcomes, the highs and lows of emotion, the winning, the losing. I spent last weekend following the Ryder Cup and as I watched the European team lift the golden chalice for the ninth time since I became a covert of this event in 1997, I realise

Here’s a stat for you: 5% of employees are aware of and/or understand their company’s strategy. Or an even better one: 71% of employees cannot recognise their own company’s strategy from a multiple choice list. (these stats are from the Harvard Business Review btw) And I think it’s a problem. A big problem. When confronted with the question “what is your strategy?”, most CEOs retaliate with a Powerpoint slide deck full of animations, colours and charts - we’ve seen some nic

Many of the organisations agilicist are drafted into have already been through an “agile transformation”. But they aren’t “transformed”. Let me tell you a story. Probably 80% of our clients have been through these big transformations already. Usually they have been led by one of the very large, and very famous consulting groups who sell with the A-Team and deliver with the D-Team (at A-Team prices). These consultancies know all the theory, they say all the right things; The

Agilicist have been parachuted into a multitude of organisations to fix issues they’ve had working with geographically distributed teams. So what does it take to make offshore development a success? Even before the pandemic, moving development offshore was becoming common-place. There are lots of reasons for this, but often it’s due to perceived cost. They look at the rate card of a supplier and think, we can save £X by moving our entire development function over to India, M

FACT: Higher Trust = Higher Productivity and more engagement. But how do you create a culture of trust in your organisation? ..... I was reading some research the other day that people at high-trust companies report 50% higher productivity and 76% more engagement than those at low-trust companies. According to Harvard researcher Paul J. Zak, there are 8 strategies to drive that trust culture but I wanted to talk about one in particular. I remember a number of years ago Agilic

“The teams aren’t productive enough!” At Agilicist , we hear this a lot from senior management. And usually it’s because of one of these 3 things: Insufficient Clarity Teams need a clear understanding of what they are doing, and why they are doing it. If they don’t have that, they get distracted by low priority work, they duplicate effort, things fall through the cracks and there is confusion which results in delays, waste and a hard time achieving goals. If your teams are re

Why Enterprises are moving away from Scrum and back to traditional delivery management. Companies are ditching the Scrum Master role. They are switching to Technical Agile Product Design Programme Delivery Managers. Anyone know of any? Basically someone steeped in agile transformation experience with a traditional project management background who has been a developer and also worked with design thinking and product. Except, unicorns don’t exist. It seems like these companies

With all this talk, I’m going to share the best #agileframework out there. This framework helped Agilicist drive multiple successful transformations. Ready? Here you go… There isn’t one. Are you joking? Why do people persist in trying to find “the perfect methodology”, as if it was some secret sauce that could automatically fix all your organisation's problems? You’ll have a better chance taking mindset advice from Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. Here’s what to do instead: Ali

47% of Agile Transformations Fail. Why? Because companies do one of these two things: They focus on Practices They think that doing Stand Ups, Sprint Planning and using story points is going to make their organisation “agile”. They think that by creating the role of Scrum Master and filling it with Project Managers they are going to become more predictable. And then they wonder why all of these impediments that are now visible aren’t magically resolving themselves? They focus

Does prioritisation Equal Good Strategy? In the dynamic and fast-paced world of business, strategy plays a pivotal role in shaping the success of organisations. At the heart of strategic decision-making lies the concept of prioritisation. Leaders constantly face the challenge of allocating limited resources to an array of goals and objectives. However, a crucial question arises: does prioritisation alone equate to a good strategy ? This article delves into the paradox of prio

I recently saw a video on social conformity that caught my eye, a modern take of the classic psychology experiment by Asch (1951). The video shows a group of people, majority actors and one being the ‘test subject’ sitting in a waiting room and rising everytime there is a beep. The ‘test subject’ eventually joins in, although confused at first. Once she is the only one left in the room she continues to rise on the beep. Watching this, even I thought, "I would never do that"

Following its ethos for continuous improvement, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has recently announced SAFe 6.0 - an updated and evolved version of the Framework. Here are a couple of the major changes we spotted. Language changes: You can view the full updated vocabulary list here , but what rubbed us the most was the deprecation of the word Program in favour of ART (Program Backlog is now ART Backlog and Program Execution is now ART Execution) and the switch from Scrum M

PI Planning is at the very heart of any SAFe implementation. But do we really need it? Well, as Dean Leffingwell states: ‘If you aren’t conducting PI planning, you aren’t using SAFe’ so perhaps the more pertinent question is, do we need SAFe? Nowadays most organisations develop their software using Agile at the team level, however traditional waterfall processes persist at the programme and portfolio levels of the enterprise as the flexibility, uncertainty and incremental rev