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Culture & Methods

Centralized vs. Decentralized Coaching

What is the difference between Centralized and Decentralized Coaching? What is more effective and under what organizational conditions can effectiveness be seen? Which approach is more susceptible to potential system gaming and other organizational dysfunctions? Why? Is coaching alignment (centralized vs. decentralized) and coaching focus (team vs. enterprise) - the same thing?

Gene Gendel
on May 20, 2018
Culture & Methods

Psychological Safety in Training Games

Games can be safe places where people can learn lessons experientially under controlled circumstances and generate insights that can be applied to their daily work. Sometimes though, games can get too personal and uncomfortable. A facilitator can create safety mechanisms for these games, including making it easy and safe for people to opt-in and opt-out.

Ben Linders
on May 11, 2018
Culture & Methods

Coaching with Curiosity Using Clean Language and Agile

Clean Language questions are bias-free questions. They can be used to discover the underlying rules, expressed values, and coping mechanisms in organizations, and to gain clarity and promote diverse ideas in groups. Simple to learn, but tricky to implement, clean questions require transparency and sharing a bit more of one’s thinking than usual.

Ben Linders
on May 05, 2018
Culture & Methods

Virtual Reality Will Disrupt Agile Coaching and Training

Online technology (virtual reality, adaptive personalized learning and videoconferencing) will disrupt the agile coaching and training spaces in the next 3-5 years. We predict that by the end of 2020 at least one large, credible agile/Scrum certification organization will be running agile/Scrum certification courses in virtual reality. Today’s winners will become tomorrow’s losers.

Elena Vassilieva Michael de la Maza
on Mar 21, 2018
Culture & Methods

Q&A on the Book It's All Upside Down

In the book It's all Upside Down, Paul McMahon provides stories from software development teams supported by upside down principles and coaching tips for applying them. He explains how you can use Essence to improve processes leading to better organizational performance.

Ben Linders
on Jun 06, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on Doing It - Management 3.0 Experiences

In the book Doing It - Management 3.0 Experiences, Ralph van Roosmalen shares his experiences from using Management 3.0 as a manager and as a coach. He explores how he experimented with ideas and practices like moving motivators and kudo cards from Jurgen Appelo’s book Managing for Happiness to find out what drives people, help them to become happier at work, and empower self-organizing teams.

Ben Linders
on May 08, 2017
Culture & Methods

Predictable Agile Delivery: The Executive Challenge

As agile grows-out of its years of self-obsession and teenage petulance into a post-agile state, ‘Predictable Agile Delivery’ feels like a realistic goal that advantages both the business sponsor and their development stakeholders. This article shares some ‘good, bad and ugly’ examples of practices that often work and some that always fail at improving large organizations.

Russ Lewis
on Mar 27, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A on The Great ScrumMaster

In The Great ScrumMaster Zuzana Šochová explores the ScrumMaster role and provides solutions for dealing with everyday and difficult situations. She describes the #ScrumMasterWay, a concept which defines three levels of operation of ScrumMasters.

Ben Linders
on Feb 03, 2017
Culture & Methods

The CA Crew on Coaching Coaches, Mixing Cultures and Future Product Direction

At the recent Agile 2016 conference, InfoQ sat down with Ronica Roth, Steve Demchuk and Eric Willeke of the CA (formerly Rally Software). They discussed coaching the coaches, transforming CA to becoming an agile organisation, mixing cultures, the state of the products and future product direction.

Shane Hastie
on Nov 13, 2016
Culture & Methods

Q&A and Book Review on Liftoff, Second Edition

The book Liftoff, Second Edition by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies, provides practices and insights for chartering teams by understanding their needs, building trust, and defining how they will interact in the team and align with other parts of the organization. It's a book for Agile coaches, Scrum masters or agile product and project managers to help teams to understand the why behind the work.

Ben Linders
on Sep 10, 2016
Culture & Methods

Test Management Revisited

The concept of test management sits awkwardly in agile, mostly because it’s a construct derived from the time when testing was a post-development phase, performed by independent testing teams. Agile, with its focus on cross functional teams, has sounded the death knell for many test managers. While test management is largely irrelevant in agile, there is still a desperate need for test leadership.

Anne-Marie Charrett
on Apr 03, 2016
Culture & Methods

A Focus on Agile Principles over Agile Rituals

When scaling agile principles through rituals it's important to constantly evaluate and evolve those rituals. This article provides examples of experiments that focus on the original intent when developing team behaviors. It shows how you can be aware of triggers that mean your team is not finding value in a ritual and what you can do to make things more visible.

Abby Bangser
on Apr 01, 2016