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Practical Agilist Shorts are snippets of agile content from my blog. Read the full post here: https://medium.com/practical-agilist/why-self-management-is-so-misunderstood-it-is-not-chaos-2ab59942b359 #agile #agilecoach #team #leadership #management #culture #transformation #strategy #systemsthinking #servantleadership

The Magic of Hallway Conversations. As much as I hate to admit it, I can be almost as effective of an agile coach working remote as I can be in person. There are however some pretty serious and yet subtle things that are missing. The accumulation of the small tidbits of information about your colleagues, what you notice about their body language, what you see in their faces, and what you learn over breakfasts and beers… it’s a wealth of knowledge, a unique perspective and a newfound ability to connect the dots. My advice to you is to embrace the opportunity to go back into the office, if only for a few days here and there. Seek out the magic of hallway conversations. Practice your art of noticing. Collect as many experiences, tidbits, and kernels of knowledge from your colleagues. You never know when that magic will emerge to help you connect the dots for others, be a better colleague, agilist, and team member.
It may even help you change your own future. Read my whole story, including two powerful quotes from Steve Jobs that relate with the LINK in BIO. #agile #communication #connection #stevejobs #postcovid #wfh

The Power of Ice Breakers for Team Building. A few years ago, when my agile coaching teammate George and I had just started working with our current agile transformation, we had this phrase we would say to our early adopter teams: "You gotta crank up the goofball!" We thought it was hilarious, a sort of challenge we would push each other on. Who could do something more ridiculous with their team to lighten things up… and teach them something through a team building exercise. What we were mostly doing was being creative with ice breakers. We'd watch a funny video together, start every meeting with a new silly question, ask questions that get the team sharing stories, or try to make everyone laugh before starting a serious retrospective. Why do you think we did these things? Read more... LINK IN BIO #agile #icebreakers #team #teambuilding

What it Means to be Product Led. Product is the core. What most companies want in becoming agile is to deliver products to market faster. Embracing Product Management concepts means baking the strategy into the organizational core, admitting you’ll serve only so many products or services to specific customers, and being crystal clear about the vision for the organization and structuring the teams of teams around the facets of that vision. Read more... LINK IN BIO. #product #agile #productdesign #ux #cx

10 Ways to Eliminate Waste in Your Agile Process. (Get it? He's lean!) I think if you asked most people where does Lean show up in their agile process, they’d have some intuitive idea that it was there somewhere but maybe not where specifically. Lean, of course, is a foundational element of the XP Values and Principles and is baked into the six Core Practices of Kanban. It's also in deciding what NOT to do in Scrum! Lean reduces waste. Lean is a drive to simplify. Lean, as it turns out, is perhaps one of the most important things that makes agile work because I think it is the core of what inspires the behaviors of an iterative mindset. Read more... LINK IN BIO. #agile #lean #mindset

What Is the Agile Mindset? The word mindset is elusive. In the linked article I describe the mindset thoroughly... as a combination of 7 different mindsets and cultures. The phrase about BEING agile vs. DOING agile is directly related to this idea of grasping and embracing the agile mindset. If you are simply taught some of the mechanics (have a big agile board with stickies, do daily stand-ups, move cards across the board, call requirements user stories instead…) you will not unlock the full potential of the agile process you are trying to follow. Read full story with LINK IN BIO.

What are the “laws of agile”? (There are none, it's a trick question!) There are actually NO real laws in agile, not like there are in mathematics or physics at least. By the very nature of its name, agile is nimble, flexible, and meant to be applied as a set of values, principles, and ultimately new ways of thinking or mindsets. Laws by contrast are often decidedly fixed and inflexible, which I think makes this an interesting topic to discuss! However, I can think of about 17 "laws" that can be used to help complement the agile ways of thinking... read more with [Link in Bio]

The most important skill you can work on for your agile team. What’s your psychological state right now? Are you paying attention? Many of us haven’t even realized the stress and strain we’ve been under just being alive these days. I’m quick to become impatient, quick to anger, and your guess is as good as mine how I might react to things under pressure or stress these days. I could easily turn into an animal of sorts. As an Agile Coach, I tend to mention "noticing" as a skillset a Scrum Master or any agilist should work on. It refers to, of course, the ability to pay attention to unspoken actions, sometimes body language, tone of voice, or behaviors that are slightly different from what might be normal for one of your team members. Read more... (link in bio) #agile #agilecoach #culture #mindset

What do managers do in agile? There’s no role describing a manager and their responsibilities in the Scrum Guide. And yet, everyone still reports to someone. If you’re a manager, you are likely hearing there are agile events that you are not invited to and that you should give the team space to innovate. You’re asked to create an environment for the team to be successful, be available to escalate issues to, and yet there is nothing specific called out in the day to day for you to specifically do. (link in bio) #agile #management #scrum #servantleadership

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