Last week, I facilitated a StrategicPlay session at ScanAgile titled “Agile Community Building – Using StrategicPlay with Lego”. Participants co-created a vision of the perfect agile community. We captured the teams presenting their models on video. Enjoy the inspiration!
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
Last week, I facilitated a StrategicPlay session at Scan-Agile titled “Agile Community Building – Using StrategicPlay with Lego”. Participants co-created a vision of the perfect agile community. We captured the teams presenting their models on video. Enjoy the inspiration!
The Agile Elephant
The first presentation shows “Agile” on the back of an elephant (the similarity to Discworld was intentional, I heard later) confronting the established mindset... Note the reference to Brian Marick.
Ivory Tower of Knowledge
Valuable ideas are created and brought to the customer. Flowers, a disco ball, and a flag, of course.
We currently witness the beginning of a new era. It has been given various names, as nobody is yet able to predict its nature. It’s been called the conceptual age, information is not enough anymore. Relationships become more important, where “knowledge stacks are replaced by knowledge flows”. Abundance, connections and choice change the game: “Mass is dead. Here comes weird.”
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
“Classical strategic planning is based upon the assumption of a slowly changing future. This assumption is wrong.”
Noah Rahford
We currently witness the beginning of a new era. It has been given various names, as nobody is yet able to predict its nature. It’s been called the conceptual age, information is not enough anymore. Relationships become more important, where “knowledge stacks are replaced by knowledge flows”. Abundance, connections and choice change the game: “Mass is dead. Here comes weird.”
It’s a paradigm shift. We haven't yet figured out where it will lead our kind, as we can ...
It is quite interesting to note how little most software developers know about hardware development. Many of us take it for granted that hardware development cannot match the pace of software. While this might be true for the case of the best software teams, able to update a software system every few minutes using continuous integration, for the common pace of biweekly software delivery this is nothing more than a false assumption.
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
At today’s ScrumTisch, the first chosen topic by the crowd was how to do Agile with non-software teams. We started the discussion with a short list of questions:
What to show at the end of the timebox?
How to set the length of the timebox?
Interestingly, these questions, although raised by the audience, apparently were not hot enough to actually get discussed... (the topic Agile Beyond Software is much broader than this post, I’m just covering what was discussed tonight—a touch on the surface...)
Hardware
It turned out, that the person suggesting the topic actually had a ...
Agile might still be a small niche which apparently is not yet recognised by the “serious” business thinkers’ community. There seem to be people out there who are rethinking management and business for the 21st century, and we are not connected to them although collaboration between us could produce great results.
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
Stephen Parry (@leanvoices) said at the ALE2011 conference that he would like to see agile/lean practitioners joining forces, using their distributed open social network to amplify their knowledge of how Agile works and how it should not be used ("to do the wrong ...
A game to let you experience four of the five domains of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework.
Andrea Tomasini
I am one of those... which those? Those who built all this, including the wonderful tool Agilo for Scrum. What do you think about it?
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
A game to let you experience four of the five domains of Dave Snowden’s Cynefin framework.
Using Lego, you go through four exercises where the problem to solve and the context you work in is designed to create a simple, complicated, complex and chaotic system. While it does not introduce you to the full potential of the sense-making framework, it is well suited to get a ...
Agile and Lean have a single purpose: to continually challenge the status quo. If you’re not doing that, you’re probably an impediment to it.
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
It’s nearly Christmas: time for wishes. This is how I envision and wish Agile and Lean to be (and I’ve seen it work, multiple times).
Value and Delight, On Time
The two pillars of Lean, as defined by Toyota, are continuous improvement (Kaizen) and respect people. Scrum and Agile are based on the Lean principles and disciplines. Agile and Lean (done right) enable your organisation to create the most value in a given amount of time—and to continuously increase your organisation’s capability to discover that value, shape scope and build awesome solutions.
We honour Sergey Dmitriev as awesome coach of the week 50, 2011!
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
My first acquaintance with Sergey has been a failure: at the amazing XP2010 conference in Trondheim, Norway, we agreed to share a ride to the airport to get home, but then lost touch... No harm done:-) Shortly after, we connected on Twitter as we had found a common passion: we wanted to create the first ever AgileCoachCamp in Norway!
Community Compassionist
I had co-organised the AgileCoachCamp Germany and was in the middle of creating the first Play4Agile unconference, and was used to (what I’ve since called privately) the “German way of conference organising”: more than a dozen organisers, weekly ...
We honour Ralf Kruse as Awesome Coach of the Week 44, 2011!
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
My first pair-coaching endeavour with Ralf was arguably the toughest setting I’ve ever been in for an agile transition. We started training teams who had basically been told by their management that all the specialisation they had accumulated over decades would be unneeded in their bright future, using Scrum... And this was an engineering company producing mechanically and electronically complex and innovative goods for a challenging small market. The setup couldn’t have been worse, and within a few days Ralf and I developed this image of standing back to back, shielding each other from the mud we were ...
What is Feature Injection? And how and why should that be applied to service delivery?
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
Recently, I worked with a service delivery team in a company that is currently changing into an agile product development organisation. The company develops and runs one of Germany's biggest websites. Let's call them Awesome Online. After introducing Scrum and Kanban to all development teams over the past two years, executive and product management have started to introduce agile and lean thinking into the organisational structure and culture.
Motivation
A main motivational factor for the development teams was the definition of product visions for all products, and the application of Feature Injection as introduced by Liz Keogh to ...
We honor Stephen Parry as Awesome Coach of the Week 36, 2011!
Olaf Lewitz
agile42 Coach.
Visiting Business Influencer and Linchpin.
My motto is that of NannyMcPhee: "When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go."
Stephen LeanVoices Parry is an unusual addition to our list, as he is not an agile coach. Stephen is a management coach working on the same goal as we are: business transformation. What I like about his approach is that he recognises the similarity and relationship of Lean and Agile. When he submitted his talk on “Creating an Integrated ICT Value Stream Using Lean and Agile Thinking” for ALE2011 which took place this week in Berlin, I was delighted to have such an experienced Lean expert at the conference, but at the same time... Wondered why he wanted to come ...
Olaf Lewitz
