How can we meet the need for fast-paced, yet reasoned, innovation? As we face a changing, adaptive business environment, "compelling events" can help organizations achieve the vision of the product that they want, while also serving as an effective device for agile project teams.
Project leaders have a key role to play in innovation. It starts with giving teams the flexibility to be creative and develop unexpected results. Facilitating customer interaction helps teams explore what is actually needed and get in the mindset to deliver it. And stakeholders must be prepared for change and ambiguity, instead of predictability.
When customers are reluctant to embrace a project team’s agile approach, should the organization modify the approach to accommodate them, or should they press on and “prove” it is the best way to deliver what they want?
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The world is changing faster than ever, and the next disruption is just around the corner. Many companies are therefore well on their way on an agile transformation to become more adaptive and resilient, but many experience that the transformation does not provide the business value they had imagined in advance and new challenges emerge.
Agile, the new approach that in 1970 was created to replace Lean Six Sigma, is now 'scaling up' by reverting to Lean Practices, such as Kanban, Theory of Constraints, Voice of Customer, and, Kaizen. Although the main scaled Agile frameworks originated as Lean frameworks, the Process improvement practices, including the very important Six Sigma component that is the most mature and confirmed way of measuring the impact of process improvement initiatives, were left out. This is partly because they require more complex and nuanced skills and knowledge and partly because they are associated with manufacturing, whilst most Agile frameworks originated in software development. In some cases, the reason for avoiding mentioning the Lean Six Sigma origins of most scaled Agile practices is just because some of the well-known Lean Six Sigma practices are now at the core of various Agile certifications. Although Lean goals (e.g., eliminate waste, adoption of standardized processes) are in opposition to the Agile mindset that fundamentally embraces change, allows good waste, and is against reliance on standardized processes, Lean and Agile can complement each other and adapt to change in an efficient way. This webinar is a presentation on how the most mature Process Improvement approach, Lean Six Sigma's Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC), can be used to fast-track Agile adoption as well as how it can be used to convince senior management that Agile can be a solution for core issues and a way to improve the bottom line.
For some agile teams, especially software development teams, the term "Change Management" is associated with the ITIL style Change Control, an engineering process created to manage risks associated with production deployment. Despite the optimistic view presented by most agile frameworks, Organization Change Management is hard. The transition to agile is often harder than any other transformation because it requires a mindset change at all levels, supported by a huge shift in the organizational culture. This webinar is a practice-based presentation on the importance of Organization Change Management in Agile Transformations and the critical role that the Project Manager must play.
Podcasts and blog posts to help you manage the challenge of transitioning from traditional project management to Agile. Dave Prior celebrates success, embraces the learning that comes from failure, and digs deep on topics you need to be up to speed on.
This blog explores pragmatic agile and lean strategies for enterprise-class contexts.
This blog concerns itself with organizations moving to business agility—the quick realization of value predictably and sustainably, and with high quality. It includes all aspects of this—from the business stakeholders through ops and support. Topics will be far-reaching but will mostly discuss FLEX, Flow, Lean-Thinking, Lean-Management, Theory of Constraints, Systems Thinking, Test-First and Agile.
Agile project leaders and teams can use this one-page worksheet to help plan and create sprint goals, including description, demonstration items, Definition of Done, and key metrics. Use in conjunction with the article Sprint Planning: Are You Doing It Backwards?
This spreadsheet is an example of how to determine WSJF prioritization, as described in the article Prioritize Weighted Shortest Job First.
When companies move to an agile Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), they often remove the processes and analysis of their waterfall SDLC because, as the Agile Manifesto puts it, “They value individual and interactions over processes and tools.” Some of the rigor should be removed – waterfall processes can get bogged down with gates and sign-offs. However, caution must be exercised to not go too far against processes and analysis and rely just upon backlogs and user stories. Requirements and the analysis that leads to those requirements are just as essential in an agile project as they are in a waterfall project. The difference lies in how much requirements analysis is completed and the timing of it.
Increasingly, project managers are being asked to understand both traditional and agile delivery approaches. But does it matter which order you learn them in? Be very careful about the stereotypes you perpetuate to new project managers.
Lean governance is a term that is being thrown around a lot, but what exactly does it mean? And is it important for the future of PMOs? Yes, but the challenge for PMOs might be in creating the environment where they can leverage lean governance.
Question: Even as we begin to emerge from the challenges of the past year, it is becoming obvious that things will never go back to exactly how they were in the past. My company wants me to use more agile approaches, along with our past predictive ones, to make us more flexible. But while I agree in concept, I’m not too sure how this would work in practice. Any suggestions?
Some in the Agile community don’t like the word “project”—they associate it with bureaucracy and bad ways of working. But the real issue is that they don’t feel their organizations understand that Agile is a way of thinking, a way of operating in today’s business world.
To truly achieve business agility, organizations must ensure their underlying operating systems support it. Six areas are crucial to success: leadership and management; culture; structure; people and engagement; governance and funding; and processes and practices.
Swarming is a method that agile teams can use to improve prioritization, collaboration, learning and overall delivery. Here’s a look at how it works—and how you can benefit from using it on your teams.
A high-performing agile team requires the development of a positive attitude. Here are eight steps to help you and your team cultivate a positive mindset, from vision, rules of engagement and buy-in, to accountability and celebration.
Sprint/task boards can be the key to success when you're managing remote projects. But what if you don't have access to fancy ones? Here is a brief summary of sprint/task boards, including what they allow you to do, how the process typically works, and a DIY solution.
Every organization expects its projects and processes to be agile. However, somewhere along the way, we end up going through rituals without actually implementing agile principles into our processes.
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