Why you need to change your way of working

Thanks to the Agile@Work team, you can watch now a recording of my Keynote in Bolzano delivered on December 4th, 2015. It is available on YouTube or just here below.

Some of the most advanced technical practices allow you to get sustainable and effective benefits only if you use them properly. Unfortunately the inertia in adapting the way of working to the changing needs can thwart any technological advantage.

In this talk, I discuss the reason why an appropriate change of the way of working is a non-postponable need. I also present some methods and indicators to help you adapting your way of working to the product’s needs, your company’s culture and the technical practices.

Here the accompanying slides from SlideShare.

Webinar recording: Measuring the Success of Your Agile Transformation

In the first segment of this webinar , part of the Thought Leadership Webinar Series, coach Brad Swanson together with Aaron Smith, editorial director of ProjectsAtWork, have discussed pro tips for using agile metrics to measure the success of your transformation. Topics included:

  • Starting with ‘why’ – creating urgency for your agile transformation by articulating the reasons change is necessary
  • Defining the key success factors in your change initiative
  • Leading and lagging indicators of success, including examples from many successful transformations
  • Avoiding unintended consequences and dysfunction that often arise from ill-chosen metrics

Brad touches a number of subject including the usage of an Agile Strategy Map, part of our methodology the Enterprise Transition Framework™.

Here are the slides of the webinar that took place Thursday June 19th.

Agility meets regulatory compliance

How can we reconcile the light touch approach of Agile development teams to the governance and information security requirements such as Data Privacy and Regulatory Compliance? At the IBM Innovate event in Orlando I discussed how to bring together the apparently conflicting needs of information security and Agile, and showed by example how Agile teams actually approach tough regulatory requirements and good governance.

Video for Agile Embedded Software Development Keynote

Here’s the complete presentation of Agile Embedded Software Development, what’s wrong with it? as recorded during the Embedded meets Agile conference in Munich on February 18th.

Andrea and Bent analyzed some example cases that included the “limitations” often attached to Agile methods and also gave some hints on how to solve them. Finally they also attacked the “culture” issue. This is especially important for companies which grew out of hardware development and do not have a solid culture that include software, and therefore are stuck with waterfall development process and a traditional view on professional barriers for their employees. These companies are usually the ones not understanding that the complexity for years gone away from pure hardware, and landed in integrated product development. Without more focus in increasing quality of the process and the techniques to build – especially mission critical – functionality, the cost of failure are going to be very high, as the amount of bugs exposed to the users will rise and the competition sharpens at the same time.

The Anatomy of an Agile Organization presented in Helsinki

Agile is mainstream. More and more companies are adopting it on the wave of enthusiasm, either of some internal successful experiments, or just because their competitors are doing it. Unfortunately though, the cultural change that follows the adoption of Agile within an organization can’t be constrained to the IT department – Here things become tricky…

I was happy to discuss these issues in Helsinki last fall at Scan Agile 2013. Thanks to Agile Finland the full video is available on Vimeo or can be viewed here.

You can check and download the slides as well.

One, No One, One Hundred Thousand Projects

I have presented this talk to two of the main conferences in Italy this November, Italian Agile Days in Reggio Emilia and Better Software in Florence. Although the presentations have been in Italian the slides and notes are mostly in English.

The presentation was titled One, No One, One Hundred Thousand Projects, or Uno, Nessuno, Centomila Progetti in Italian, with a nod to the work of Nobel laureate writer Luigi Pirandello. A key aspect is that often problems and solutions are common between companies because independent from the the context.

You Don’t Need to Change. Survival is Optional

The title refers to a quote attributed to W. Edwards Deming.

Today there’s general consensus – and a lot of noise – about the need for change. Still, organizations are having a hard time with change. Most change initiatives fail. Sometimes it’s just a matter of lack of will to change. Sometimes organizations just don’t even understand why or what they have to change.

Change is often believed to be magically reachable designing new processes on paper, possibly paying huge amounts of money to consultants.

The talk introduces the Kanban Method (not to be confused with the Kanban Tool) as an evolutionary approach to managing change and as a way to build a learning and adapting organization.

 

printed sticky notes glued on board

Kanban for Portfolio Management 
talk at OSS4B in Prato

On September 19, I gave a talk at the Open Source Software for Business conference in Prato.

The Conference has been very well organized and I had the honor to share the stage with the likes of Gene Kim (author of The Phoenix Project book), Dragos Dumitriu (the ‘hero’ manager described in David J Anderson’s Kanban book) and many others.

Slides for my talk Kanban for Portfolio Management are available here.