Written by Tim Zack

Making any meaningful change requires people to think, feel, and/or do something differently. Another way of saying this is getting people to move. Getting them to move from where they are currently to somewhere new.

The challenge is the status quo provides a sense of familiarity, comfort and certainty. Change from that means entering into the unknown, the uncomfortable, and the uncertain which can be scary. Fear is a force that pulls us back to the status quo. Change, getting people to move, requires overcoming the force of fear. …

Written by Joel Norman and Yusuf Hakim

In our Try It Series, we will explain a common Agile or company problem, and provide solutions that have worked for us in the past. We include entire job aides and coaching materials for our readers to experiment with at their teams . We do this to help others and solicit feedback.

Question: How do you enable 100+ teams to execute relative estimation rapidly and set up newly-placed Agile coaches for success?

Answer: Parking Cars. And the coaches learned a lot more than the teams did!

PS: We’ve attached the actual job aide…

Written by Jeff Streitmatter

I thought to be a good engineer, you had to always be right. But upon leaving college to enter the real world, I realized that being right was not the end all, in fact, just a stepping stone to being understood.

Once I began to appreciate that “right” was not so black and white — that there were dimensions to it — I started to see how the same thing is true in organizations.

See, when the language of business becomes reduced to process and rules, we lose fidelity in the bigger picture. We like rules…

Written by Joel Norman

The cursing could be heard outside the room again. The partner had botched another launch, and everyone’s pager was ringing off the hook. Helplessly, the team assembled and did the normal ritual checking the APM for all systems, and low and behold the external payment processor that bank forces us to use is down again. This time the intern won the bet for MTTF at 60 minutes. No one really wins this bet.

“I’ll call Jerry,” said the Scrum Master.

Jerry was the architect and program manager for the payment processor. He was as great guy…

Written by Dave Prior

When the pandemic started, we had to move our CSM and CSPO training to an online format. For the certification courses, the Scrum Alliance recommends not more than 30, but for LeadingAgile’s CSM and CSPO classes, we set a target class size at 15 with a max at 18. There are a number of reasons for this:

Value Delivered

In each class, we run 3 in-class retrospectives and an end-of-class survey. What we have learned is that the classes rated as delivering the most value are the ones with 12–15 students.

Using Scrum to Run Classes

All our CSM and CSPO classes are…

Written by Joel Norman

Warning: This is not legal advice; this is common sense advice ~ talk to your corporate counsel before you do anything. Max is not my friend’s real name.

Max is mad. Actually, Max is furious.

The latest report on software development from the organization’s consultant, a Big 4 Firm, concluded that his organization needed more separation of duties. For the last 2 years, Max’s teams have been attempting to implement Continuous Deployment, and every turn the implementation of Continuous Deployment was stifled by self-imposed corporate governance. Max needed advice.

At a high level in my non-lawyer…

Written by Yusuf Hakim

Try It: Escalations

In our Try It Series, we will explain a common Agile or company problem, and provide solutions that have worked for us in the past. We’ll also include complete job aides and coaching materials for our readers to experiment with their teams. We do this to help others and solicit feedback.

Caller: Hello 911? I smell smoke!

911: Please hold, we’re incredibly busy today.

911: (90 minutes later) I hear you have smoke! Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions.

Caller: I think I need a firetruck? The smoke is a fire now! The instructions on…

Written by Adam Jennison

Velocity, while seemingly a simple measure of team output, is quite often one of the most misconstrued metrics by organizations new to Agile ways of working — by both managers and the teams themselves. It is important to understand that the usefulness of velocity as a predictor of a team’s future story capacity in a sprint is an emergent property of a persistent team following an estimate and execute cycle; the key implication of this being that stability of velocity is what’s desirable, regardless of the magnitude.

Here’s a quick outline of a healthy way to…