In Hamburg, meet Solutions

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agile42 is a Quality Partner of the great solutions.hamburg 2016 that started today in Hamburg, Germany. Tomorrow, September 8th, we will host half a day of presentations devoted to Agile solutions for the enterprise.

solutions.hamburg 2016

I will introduce with a new talk about improving the chances of success of your organization: explicitly measuring and designing culture is an enabler towards agility and can provide incredible advantages to an organization development. Understanding how to lead such change is the one thing that might save your company in the rough waters of todays market. Are you ready for the challenge?

Together with Gregory Keegan and Konrad Pogorzala we will then facilitate two workshops: first, How to design a more Resilient and Antifragile organization, where the goal is to quickly learn which aspects within an organization are relevant to improve its resilience and antifragility. Working in groups participants will explore different ways to improve their own organization and making it more resilient and antifragile.

We will then go deeper with Organizational culture is the key to grow: organizational culture exists whether you want it or not, and if culture eats strategy for breakfast, you’ll better know how to grow the right culture for your organization. Working in groups with the participants we will explore the Competing Value Framework as a model to measure and design your organizational culture.

Hope to see you!

ProductCamp Berlin tickets soon available

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ProductCamp Berlin is the first and only unconference for product managers, product marketing managers, entrepreneurs and others with passions for product, online and IT, in Berlin, Germany. More than 200 active participants meet in Berlin every year. The event is held since 2010 and is planned by a team of local volunteers and run on a Saturday by everybody attending.

The team are currently preparing the 2016 event which will take place on the 29th of October. We are happy to be again sponsor of this great event.

ProductCamp Berlin

Tickets will go on sale next Sunday, 4th September at 11am (Berlin time). Past editions have been sold out quickly so our advice is to jump on the opportunity to book a place for this day of sharing and learning!

Sponsoring LeSS Conference in Amsterdam

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LeSS ConferenceWe’re glad to be able to contribute to the LeSS Conference in Amsterdam on 30-31 August as a sponsor.

The event will feature Bas Vodde and Craig Larman, co-creators of the Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) framework, together with other important speakers of the community. It promises “less booths and more practitioners” and also “Experiments and Experience”
and “Teams and Communities”.

Join us in Amsterdam!

A culture of Growth

Growing Agile

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At agile42 we dislike the term scaling applied to agile, or better agility. The reason for our not liking it, is because it evokes metaphors which are bound to manufacturing such as: “scaling a plant”, “scaling production” and all the rest that can evoke assembling and building things.

Effectively establishing continuous improvement to an organization at large requires to develop quite some discipline, infrastructure and most of all openness and trust. Senior coaches Andrea Tomasini and Dhaval Panchal have spent a significant amount of time in analyzing data and cases from different case studies all around the world and the experience has been included in agile42 tools like the Enterprise Transition Framework™ (ETF) and the Agile Strategy Map™.

A snapshot of our approach is included in the new article Growing Agile… Not scaling! just published thanks to InfoQ. Some of the key topics discussed in the article:

  • Why it is important to focus on growing your own agility instead of taking shortcuts and adopting someone else’s model
  • Which role culture plays in an agile transition and effectiveness of organizational change
  • How to make sure you are agile at heart, and move continuous improvement to an organizational level, to become a more agile organization
  • How to leverage your organizational structure to better focus on customer value and deliver what is important to them
  • How to increase your organization autonomy by decentralizing control and creating containers for empowerment

You can read the full piece at InfoQ.

Agile – in Education

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One of the most typical FAQ’s during agile coaching & training is “Can we apply it in our company?” “Will it work for us?”. Obviously, there’s no knowing before you try, yet usually the answer is “Yes” :) Here is why: Agile is not a rigid frame, a set of rules, a ‘process’ or ‘project management method’. Rather more, it is an approach, a way-of-working, a mindset. Being customer-first, based on trust & transparency, having the ability to expose the entire process, focusing on waste & bottlenecks..all these aspects make it very powerful, yet flexible. It enables you to see & seek solutions for problems without being too restrictive; and helps you find out what works best for you by trying out different solutions, thereby inherently “responding to change”.

Rather than talking about the numerous benefits & advantages of agile for companies; in this article I would like to shed some light on a different side of agile: education. Several schools are implementing agile methods for class, and universities have long begun including agile courses in their curricula.

Let us talk about higher level education first.

Agile development methods are becoming such an integral part of software engineering nowadays, that numerous universities already incorporate agile in their undergrad / grad curricula.

For instance at Işık University, agile is part of the undergraduate course “Current Issues in Information Systems Analysis and Design”, alongside with Data Structures and Operating Systems. Atılım offers a Software Engineering elective with 7.5 ECTS points, “Agile Software Development Approaches”, focusing on Scrum & XP. Similarly, the University of Auckland, New Zealand has an “Agile and Lean Software Development Course” since 2013, while Arel University offers a technical elective “Agile Software Development” for computer engineers in the 8th semester.

Carnegie Mellon - Software Engineering Masters ProgramSome institutes like Carnegie Mellon have it as part of their software engineering masters program, including XP, Crystal and Kanban; others like Leicester offer an entire master’s degree on agile software engineering, with courses ranging from C++, through “Personal and Group Skills”, and even Game Theory.

Agile is also gaining momentum in school level education as well. For instance, students at the Ashram College in Netherlands use a version of Scrum in class. In place since 2011, this practice was first initiated by two chemistry teachers. The Scrum implementation not only allows students to learn more interactively and effectively, but also helps them acquire life skills like punctuality, leadership, planning, and teamwork. The implementation “eduScrum” still continues to this day, and the initiators are now working with an education designer to further develop the program & scale it.

The Blueprint High School in Chandler, Arizona, also uses agile methods. John Miller from AgileClassrooms has helped  Blueprint High School in their vision of preparing students for the 21st century. They realised that merely a diploma is nowhere near enough for that; students also need to be armed with further skills such as planning, collaboration, teamwork – skills that are “very apparent in Agile and Scrum”.

Jeff Sutherland, co-inventor of the Scrum framework, also mentions this topic in his TED Talk “The art of doing twice as much in half the time” as well as in his article, “Scrum: The Future for Education?”. You can find interviews with the schools as well as further related details in this article. Here are a few quotes:

“They also brought Scrum home, teaching it to their parents, using it for garage sales. One 4th grader reported actually teaching her mom, now she uses Scrum at her work.”

“A 4th grade teacher reported that kids would come in sick because they did not want to miss their Scrum. She actually had to send them home.”


Last but not least, a 1st grader’s Kanban Board story: This little girl has been using a Kanban Board (under her father’s guidance) since pre-school years. After starting school, she quickly outgrew the older board, so the board also began to grow & evolve accordingly. Her father explains how much this helps raise a self-directed child, how she is now able to take on more responsibility and how proud & happy she is overall.

As you can see, it’s a fairly wide spectrum: universities, high schools, elementary or even pre-schoolers.. On top of all this, there are a significant number of people, who manage their long-term life goals & projects this way as well. I also keep a personal Kanban Board for my own “backlog”. Needless to mention, we all use agile approaches internally as a company to manage our work & projects. :)

In this article, we have talked about agile in education and personal use. See you next time in another post!

Estimating is NOT planning at Keep Austin Agile

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I presented at Keep Austin Agile 2016, on Thursday, May 26 on Estimating in an Agile context.

Agile Manifesto Values and Principles do not, not even once, mention “estimates” any where. Yet rapid adoption of estimation techniques labeled as “Agile Estimation” techniques puzzle me. In my experience as practitioner, advisor and coach: I have experienced very limited benefits from estimating and often find that estimates create more harm than good. There are however legitimate business concerns that need active management. Estimates hinder real business agility by servicing temporary comfort through plausible but highly improbable plans.

I started from two things that are certain about estimates: 1) estimates are always wrong and 2) you will spend more time estimating that you should have otherwise used to do the work instead.

You can watch the video on YouTube or directly here.

Building Automated Tests presented at IDI2016

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On April 1st I presented A Developer’s Journey Into Building Automated Tests for IT from the Ground Up at Incontro DevOps Italia 2016 in Bologna (IDI2016), a meeting of Italian and international DevOps that also has been sponsored for the second year in a row by agile42.

During my presentation, I talked about how we’ve approached writing infrastructure code for agile42 and Agilo Software with the same focus and professionalism that we dedicate to application code. This means, for example, to use TDD in order to have better design besides all of the benefits that this technique provides. We strived for having a test base composed of different types of tests so we can have confidence that not only single units or parts of a system work, but also that the integration of the parts produces the expected behavior.


The most important aspect of our setup is probably how all of this converges into a continuous integration system that runs all of the tests, inspects code quality by means of static code analysis and gives us rapid feedback about our development efforts. This was not so straightforward and we had to face several issues (you can read about them here and here), but the end result is something that radically changed our view about the infrastructure itself and the code necessary to run it. The reduced maintenance costs and the time needed to apply changes totally made up for the effort we dedicated to this part of our work.

You can watch the video of the talk on Vimeo or embedded here.


A culture of Growth

Stop scaling… recording from AgileEE

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Thanks to the friends of Agile Eastern Europe, we can share you with an updated video recording of Andrea Tomasini’s talk Stop scaling… Start growing an Agile organization, as presented in Kyiv on April 8th, 2016. Video is available on YouTube and embedded here.

In this keynote Andrea presented guidelines and heuristics for growing an agile organization. You will understand why the first step in any transition must be learning how to change. Small inexpensive experiments and empirical metrics will lead you towards your strategic goal, iteratively and incrementally.

Strategic advantage lies in being yourself and doing the right things the right way. Those who copy what their competitors are doing, place themselves behind the pack — a sure way of losing. This is why “scaling” agility is misleading at best, and disastrous at worst. When you take an existing model and fit your organization to that, you lose much of what makes you unique and different.

Companies small and large must instead learn to grow their own agility for their own advantage. This sounds simple — and it is, when you know what to look for. The agile transition never ends — but you know it’s working when transitioning becomes a way of life. This not only lets you adapt to new market conditions: it also allows you to create change in the market, on your own terms.

Invitation to Scrum Gathering Munich

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The fall event of the Scrum Alliance calendar returns to Germany with the Global Scrum Gathering® Munich 2016 that will is scheduled in the Bavarian capital from October 17th to 19th. With agile42 we are proud to be once again sponsor of a Global Scrum event and we hope to meet as may friends there as possible.

Global SCRUM GATHERING® Munich 2016

A number of agile42 coaches will be in attendance and will deliver sessions including Dave Sharrock, Niels Verdonk and myself. I personally will also be the facilitator of the #SGMUN Coaches’ Clinic: conference attendees will be able to visit the Coaches’ Clinic during the Gathering to speak one-on-one with an experienced Agile coach.

The Gathering is a few months away but registration is already available and previous events have sold out well in advance, so check all the information and registration options on the Scrum Alliance site.

Hope to see you in Munich!

Organisation development in Midrange Magazin

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Agile Methods can’t be bought – but they can be learned: this is the premise of the article that I have penned for the May, 2016 issue of the German publication Midrange Magazin.

The article, titled Organisation development using Scrum or Kanban (Organisationsentwicklungnach Scrum oder Kanban) explains how simple rules and transparency are the two things that stand out in Agile Practices like Scrum and Kanban.

However, introducing them into the organization is sometimes not as easy as it seems. The transition to using agile methods doesn’t only change the processes within the company, it also requires a change in mindsets of all the people involved – teams take on more responsibility and management style will need to change from “Command & Control” towards “Agile Leadership”. In order to make these changes successful and long-lasting, a targeted, role-based coaching is necessary.