How I tried Holacracy and Lived to Tell the Tale
This is the story of introducing Holacracy at a New Zealand tech company, whose CTO gave me a one-line instruction: “I’d like you to make it happen.” Come along and […]
Organization in Rank-conscious and Reserved East Asia on the Bumpy Track to Team Health
Agile started off from an interest in how to develop valuable software better in a small team, but has since evolved to encompass a specific culture of working in an […]
Downfalls of Coaching in a Hierarchical Model
Companies of size require more than one coach for support. How does an organization know if coaching is worth the investment or not? During transformations, it’s common to structure coaches […]
An Agile Triple Play: Business Process Re-Engineering meets SOA meets Large Scale Agile
This experience report will address the volatility, challenges and solutions implemented within a Fortune 500 Order to Delivery manufacturing program with the goal of re-engineering and aligning global business processes […]
Selling the Investment to Pay Down Technical Debt – The Code Christmas Tree
Sharing our experience in making code complexity and unit coverage visible in the hallway adjoining our team room and the conversations that happened around it. Not only did it help […]
Learning to Experiment
The best organizational changes in my career have happened as a result of emergencies. Support for the process of experimentation only seems to become enabled whenever the status quo has […]
“Soup or Salad” – Models of Diversity
Diversity is a multi-faceted and overloaded word. In this experience report I describe some of my own experiences with diversity along with some insights and musings. One of my main points is that diversity is great, but we need to go beyond the accepted types of diversity and find new (and diverse) ways of being diverse.
Yes, You CAN Let Your Teams Self-Organize!
‘Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.’ This principle from the Agile Manifesto – that teams […]
The codeX Story: Training and Placing Diverse Talent in the Software Industry
codeX is an agile-first vocational coding programme in South Africa, with a mission to increase the talent pool that the software industry can draw from. We focus on reaching groups […]
Beyond Whack-a-Mole Coaching – Using Data Analysis to Find High ROI Coaching Opportunities
Determining where to focus Agile Coaching and Training in a large “already Agile” Tech organization can feel a bit like playing Whack-a-Mole. With hundreds of Agile practices and mindsets to […]
Share the Load: Distributing Design Authority with Lightweight Decision Records
Documenting architecture design decisions is commonly considered a good practice but few teams take the time to write down the decisions they make. In our experience this happens for a […]
Agile & HR: Driving cultural change as one team
Is your HR department slowing you down? Do you feel like they’re a major impediment in your agile journey? We will tell the story of how Vistaprint’s HR team, now […]
