Tag Archive for: agile42

Growing as a Scrum Master and Beyond

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Last Wednesday, the 11th of November, we ran our webinar "Growing as a Scrum Master and Beyond"! This topic clearly resonated with many, as we set a new record number of participants. We spotted familiar names who have been following us over the years, and many new names we hope to see again. It makes us happy to see our webinar network growing! 

We had the great honour of welcoming two guests on this webinar, Jelena Vucinic and Bob Stomp, who joined our CSP-SM training this fall. Together with agile42 trainers & coaches, Giuseppe De Simone and Niels Verdonk, we hope they provided you with the content you were after. 

As the coaches mentioned early on in the webinar, being a Scrum Master in a company is much more than just attending a 2-day training to get certified. Whilst your role is to primarily coach the team, it is also to teach, give advice, be a mentor and role model of the Agile and Scrum values and principles. This is not always an easy task. The knowledge and skills you need as a Scrum Master will grow through education, perhaps some additional coaching and most of all the experience and support of other Scrum Masters in your organization and network. 

As Jelena mentioned during the webinar, a typical day for a Scrum Master is not only to facilitate Scrum meetings, however a multitude of other undertakings. You observe the team, prepare for meetings, follow-up action points from meetings, handle impediments, have 1-on-1 meetings with the team members and stakeholders when needed and think about new ways in which you can help your team.

The webinar attendees were particularly interested in the ways you can grow as a Scrum Master, for which there are various paths. You can of course take the training provided on the Scrum Master growth path as visualised in the diagram below. Each training goes deeper into the content of the Scrum Master, and you will gain valuable new skills and learnings to add to your toolbox. The below diagram shows the steps to become a CSP-SM: 

 

We recommended reading The Hitchhikers Guide to Agile Coaching and checking out the post on 5 books we believe every Scrum Master should read.

Other training we offer is the Advanced Team Coaching Course which we recommend for those who already have CSM certification. There is also the ICAgile Team Facilitation Certification to support you as a Scrum Master. Furthermore you could consider coaching from one of our Agile coaches, for example, to grow you or your team of Scrum Masters.

Many of you listening asked us about the whole CSP path, how to grow skills and mindset as well as next steps after CSP-SM certification, and we feel that depends on what skills you wish to deepen. Below you can see examples of next steps, and our Mentoring programme can assist you on these paths. Mentoring is a long term commitment both from your side and the Mentors side, and this is a great opportunity to meet like-minded people, and to grow and learn together. 

If you would like to explore next steps on your individual growth path and/or like to enquire about our Mentoring programme after the CSP-SM, please get in touch with us and we would be happy to help.

Our upcoming trainings can be found here - take the next step on your journey with us!

The recording is available online. Feel free to watch it again and share with your network. It is also available on YouTube.

 

Below you will find the slides, with some further content. Please also feel free to share the slides around.

 

Connect with us on social media, to stay updated with blogs, webinars, training and other events which support your learning journey :) 

 

Have a great weekend, and don't forget to check out post and upcoming webinars!

Manage Agile 2020 Conference

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Andrea Tomasini & Dave Snowden host the keynote at the remote Manage Agile 2020.

agile42 co-founder, Andrea Tomasini, and founder Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge, Dave Snowden, will host a keynote at the Remote Manage Agile  on November 24th from 9.20am (CET). The topic is ’… the one most responsive to change’. This keynote will be held in English.

 

agile42 is the Gold Sponsor of the Manage Agile conference taking place from November 23rd to 26th, 2020. In order to ensure every participants safety, the conference will be taking place remotely this year. There is a great line up of speakers split across lectures, workshops and keynotes. It will be a great opportunity for our network to meet like-minded individuals.

As sponsors of this event, we would like to extend a discount to our valued network. Please use the discount code, MA_aha_20%, when signing up to receive a 20% discount off the standard ticket.

The program (only available in German) is attached here. We hope many of the topics will be of interest to you.

 

Also Simon Sablowski is keeping a workshop on November 24th at 10.50am (CET) covering the topic, "Wechselwirkungen zwischen Führungsverhalten, Kultur und Struktur einer Organisation". This workshop will be held in German.

 

We look forward to ‘e-meeting’ you at the conference, and to discuss how agile42 can be a partner in bringing Agile Leadership to your organisation.

Effective Large-Scale Learning

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Last week we shared our Corporate Learning Program with our network in a webinar. It was a great pleasure to welcome Katrin Birrer from JTI (Japan Tobacco International) to the session who shared her insights and experience from collaborating with agile42 on JTI’s Agile Champion program, a learning experience which is being rolled out to 10,000 employees. From agile42’s side, our experts Simon Sablowski and Lothar Fischmann, presented the Corporate Learning Program.

More and more large corporates want and need to embrace agility. Becoming agile starts with achieving a shared understanding of the values, principles, and key practices. The challenge is to provide learning to thousands of employees. Agile is existing in many parts of organisations, but having every person attend a stand-alone training, probably with different providers, comes with some problems. The learning is different, in as many ways as there are providers. It takes time to coordinate the training, along with it potentially being a significant investment. 

We’re finding that corporations are seeking solutions that are more cost-effective than sending individuals to training here and there. The Corporate Learning Program, co-created with the client, is more effective, in many ways. 

In the webinar last week we got to take part in JTI’s story and their experience of working with us on their program. We both learnt a great deal through co-creating the program, and we're very pleased with the outcome. You can hear more about this from the recording. 

 

Picture: An example of JTI's program

 

Our Corporate Learning Program offers large-scale learning by:

  • allowing individuals to familiarise themselves with key concepts at their own pace
  • providing everyone with a coherent learning experience
  • customising the learning journey to your company’s needs
  • blending virtual self-learning (understanding key concepts) with experiential learning (putting things into practice)

 

If this sparks your interest, how should you start?

The first step is to get in touch with us, so that we can gain an understanding of your situation - how big of an organisation you are; what your needs are.

Once we understand the needs, we can start to co-create the Corporate Learning Program to ensure the program is tailor-made for your needs and context.

From the picture below, you can see the next steps that follow when we have a program that is ready for employees to start exploring.

 

 

 

Here you can find the slides from the presentation.

 

The recording is available online. You can watch it again or share it with your network as you see fit. It is also available on YouTube.

 

We hope that you get in touch with us so that we can start to explore your needs!

 

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

Cultural Awareness and Coherence (ORGANIC agility Principle #1)

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On October 14, I held a webinar about the first principle of ORGANIC agility. Together with 50+ participants, we explored the importance of culture and various ways of making the culture visible both in theory and practice.

Culture is, briefly, “the way we do things around here”. It is the context of all activities within an organization and sets the norms for what behaviour is acceptable and what is not acceptable. It has a very strong influence on how people behave. And companies that are unaware of their culture, uninterested in what it means, or lacking the right tools, risk ending up with a culture that does not fit their strategy.

Culture also plays a very important role in determining how people react to change. If the culture is incoherent, people will find it difficult to agree on which way to go. They may also react to changes in wildly different ways.

What to do about it? It’s clear that culture is complex and can't be designed. We simply can't draw up an “ideal culture” and then deploy it. What we can do instead is measure what we have, and influence it to create more of a certain type of behaviour, and less of another. By running small safe-to-fail experiments, we can try out different approaches and see what works.

When measuring culture, we can choose from a large number of dimensions, including proactivity/reactivity, subordination, risk appetite, emotionality, masculinity/femininity, conflict resolution, power distance, etc. etc. As it turns out, the two most important dimensions — the ones with the strongest explanatory power — are outwards vs. inwards focus, and flexibility vs. control. They form the basis of the Competing Values Framework.

 

If you want to measure your culture in your organization, you can have a look at our Organizational Scan here.

A company would start by taking a baseline. A month or two of continuous sampling is typical, in order to even out temporary fluctuations. We then run the survey continuously, following the organisational culture in general but also tracking our pilot/experiment teams specifically. What happens over time? If the experiments are giving positive results, we should see the experiment teams migrate slowly in the desired direction.

Leadership styles are going to be particularly relevant to the change process. Subordinates slowly change their behavior to conform to the leadership style that is visible. Having a conscious approach to storytelling and an awareness of ritualized behavior can also support the change and provide some coherence.

 

Below you can find the slides from my presentation.

The recording is available online. You can watch it again or share it with your network as you see fit. It is also available on YouTube.

During the webinar, I referenced an article on organisational culture. I’ve found it valuable because it gives a decent overview of cultural dimensions.

  • Kim S. Cameron and Deborah R. Ettington. The conceptual foundation of organizational culture. Working Paper #544, The University of Michigan, School of Business Administration, Ann Arbor, Michigan, March 1988.

We also mentioned the Cynefin framework by Dave Snowden which underpins the whole ORGANIC agility framework. 

 

On November 16 @ 16:00 CET, my colleague Giuseppe will be continuing the webinar series with Principle #2 on decision making in context. Here is the link to that webinar, and we hope to see you there.

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

agile42 meets Swedbank – in a webinar

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As many of you might have seen, agile42, along with our long-standing client, Swedbank, wrote a Success Story about our journey together. Ever since we've been keen to host a webinar on this, to tell the story! We had the honour of inviting Cecilia Kåhrström to join the webinar with us, where she, together with agile42Sweden's, Giuseppe De Simone, walked the audience through the work we did together. 

The journey has been long: some parts of the work with Swedbank began back in 2014. This webinar and the Success Story, specifically focused on the work with Group IT, which started in 2018. A lot has been done together since then, and we are happy to say that we today can call Cecilia and all Group IT leaders and employees, not clients, but friends. 

In the picture below, Cecilia summarized all the activities that supported the achievement of their current level of agility and we are particularly proud of the bubbles on the right. In fact they show the things which Swedbank continued on their own after we left, witnessing the accomplishment of our mission: grow our clients’ capabilities so that they are able to persevere on their path to agility sustainably after we leave.

The discussion between Cecilia and Giuseppe opened up these topics. 

A particular focus was given to one of the most important factors in this Success Story: how the leaders understood early on that agility could not be achieved just by buying and deploying a predefined process. It was amazing to observe how fast they got this clear understanding compared to other leaders we've met that are just looking for a pre-packaged solution. Every organization that is interested in becoming sustainably agile needs to make this journey on their own: you should not worry about reinventing the wheel, because the journey is more important than the goal.

The slides from the webinar can be found here. You are welcome to have a look at them, and for any questions you have, you can turn to us.

This webinar broke our record with questions from the audience. We had more questions than we could answer. From the recording you can hear the answers that we managed to get to live.

If you missed the live webinar, the recording is available here! It is also available on YouTube. Please have a look at it and feel free to share it around with friends and colleagues.

We hope that you enjoyed this Success Story. For any questions, feel free to reach out to us!

*Follow this link to view upcoming & past webinars on our website*

agile42 and Divimove

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agile42 + Divimove reference video

agile42's CEO and Founder, Andrea Tomasini, spoke with Tobias Schiwek, the CEO of Divimove, about how Divimove has grown in resilience through agility, with the help of agile42. This discussion has been recorded as a reference video. A fun way to share client experiences and the work that we do!

Divimove, Europes leading digital studio, has recently gone through a major merge, and as a result has had to overcome challenges within the new organization. One of the hurdles was the merging of teams and finding a way of working together. Divimove's aim was not only to grow in numbers, however, also to grow in a coherent way.

The video covers the early days of agile42 & Divimove's collaboration, along with how we helped them visualise their work as well as tools we used to support their transition. Alignment and getting people on the same page was one particular challenge. We found that supporting the new culture and structure became critical, and in the video you will hear in more detail what the outcome of working with agile42 in only 6 months looks like.

Check out the video and listen to the story of Divimove!

Post agile42 Connect

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The agile42 Connect - A Series of Fortunate Events was a great success. We had public sessions running from the 27th to the 29th of July, as part of agile42's Innovation Sprint. Usually every year the whole company, including families, gather together for a week of Innovation. Besides working together, creating new things, supporting ongoing work and services, we most importantly - have fun!

This year we were supposed to go to Canada for our Innovation week, however COVID-19 forced us to change tack. We instead went virtual and decided to make some parts of the Innovation Sprint public. We miss not being able to see each other in person, but what can we do?

In this blog post, we will share the Panel discussion with you as well as the other 3 webinars we ran this week.

Help us to help!

This year, we chose a needy charity, Nutrition with Love & Kindness, where those taking part in the #agile42Connect event could donate. This charity converted their venue kitchen business to provide 12000 nutritious meals a month to vulnerable families during this COVID-19 crisis.

Funds raised will enable them to keep providing 12000 meals a month to the local community. Good nutrition improves immunity and creates stronger, healthier, happier humans. With just €8.00 you will feed 1 person for a month.

Please donate and help those in need!

Let's start with the Panel discussion. Through out the week, in the back of our heads, was the thinking around "The NEW NORMAL". What is the new normal? Or is it just the normal? The Panel discussion was about pandemic effects, market changes and what might happen next. The panelists discussed their various challenges, how they've adapted their way of working and insights into how companies can try weather the storm.

We had a great group of panelists - agile42's, Peter Hundermark, was the moderator of the panel, along with guests, Christoph Bornschein from TLGG, Richard Sheridan from Menlo Innovations, Tim Mois from sipgate, Tobias Schiwek from Divimove, Sonja Blignaut from Cognitive Edge and last but not least, Andrea Tomasini from agile42. Below you can watch the recording of the session.

 

OrgScan Summer Offer

If you want to see how your organization is handling the changes we are facing, the challenges and how work is moving on, you can test your organizational culture with OrgScan Starter summer offer. The summer offer is valid until August 15th 2020.

Tuesday started off with a session in the morning by Bastian Wilhelms, one of the founders of sipgate. At sipgate, Bastian has been driving the change to an all-in agile, decentralized and mission based organization since 2009. He is a Senior Advisor to the Product Leads at sipgate and helps set the vision for success with Scrum as well as sipgate’s overall company strategy.

He gave us very interesting insights into how work has been continuing at sipgate, as well as how to find and establish meaningful metrics for any recurring fee business model. He also delved into story-telling techniques.

Please find the recording of this session below.

Tuesday ended with a session together with Richard Sheridan who gave us a virtual tour of Menlo Innovations. Richard shared Menlo’s history, culture and practices – and how they're rebuilding a joyful culture in our new normal of today. It was nice to be able to take part in the largest (so far!) virtual tour of their company. Some of our agile42 colleagues actually visited Menlo a few years ago, and now we had the chance to hear how Menlo works today.

The stories which Richard shared are something that we all can relate to, and if you missed this session, please find the recording below.

If you want to sign up for a tour, please feel free to contact our friends at Menlo!

Wednesday was the last day of our public webinars. The day started off with a presentation by Yasmin Akay and Lena Natus. Yasmin is the Managing Director of Divimove’s Production and Strategy Studio, Europe’s leading digital studio and home of digital content creators. Lena is a consultant at Divimove, and her role is Company Culture and Organizational Development. She is also an actress. This session was about Human Behaviour consuming entertainment content and interacting with it.

They spoke about Social Media, different platforms, what to think about, how to try out new things, to be human, to breath and to listen to the audience you are trying to target. This session was incredibly valuable to all of us trying to build images of ourselves online, as well as branding our companies.

Have a look at the recording here!

Last but not least, I want to thank everyone that took part in our #agile42Connect event this week. We had many new faces join the webinars along with our valued regulars.

A big thanks to all of our guests, some of whom even took time out from their vacations to join us! It was a pleasure to hear your thoughts and ideas on the "New Normal". As the guests donated their time for free, we really hope that you can make a donation to Nutrition with Love & Kindness!

A big thanks to all at agile42 for the fantastic virtual Innovation Sprint. 2020 will be the Innovation Sprint we will never forget. We're also sure our "fun day" on the 30th July will be just as memorable!

See you next year!