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Q&A on “The Coaching Booster”

An interview with Shirly Ronen-Harel and Jens R. Woinowski, authors of "The Coaching Booster", about why they based their book on lean and agile methods, why change needs to become an ingrained habit, how you can establish a rhythm of action, the value that a coachee can get from coaching, combining retrospectives with agile coaching, and what people can do to develop their coaching skills.

Ben Linders
on Aug 10, 2015
Increasing your Agility: An interview with Dave Thomas

At the GOTO Amsterdam 2015 conference Dave Thomas gave a keynote presentation titled "agile is dead". While the "Agile" industry is busy debasing the meaning of the word, the underlying values are still strong. Dave Thomas suggests to stop using the word agile and switch to agility: repeatedly taking small steps towards where you want to be and evaluate what happened.

Ben Linders
on Jul 21, 2015
How Agile Has Changed Test Management

Agile methods have many traditional test management activities built into them. With desired agile team traits like self-organising, role blurring and skill diversification, the nature of test management is changing. We have to question whether the role of Test Manager should exist in effective agile organisations and how the activities which have long made up the role are divested?

Ben Linders
on May 11, 2015
Inviting over Imposing Agile

We are at a crossroads in the agile-adoption narrative. Early in the story teams were the “bottom-up” vector for agile spread. Next the way agile spread started to shift away from teams to executives and “management”. Recent developments move us towards consultancy for bring agile to larger enterprises that struggle with change. Which way is agile going to go next?

Daniel Mezick
on Apr 11, 2015
Culture & Methods

Enterprise Agility Through Culture

Culture plays an important role in organizational change. Successful agile adoption tends to depend on the ability to change the culture. Making the culture explicit and becoming more conscious of the existing culture is important in agile transformations according to Olaf Lewitz and Michael Sahota. Giving attention to culture can increase the agility of an organization.

Ben Linders
on Apr 06, 2015
Creating a Creative and Innovative Culture at Scale

King Digital Entertainment needs to foster a creative and innovative culture with engaged and motivated people to create fun games. They have established an environment with freedom and trust, with space for experiments, exploration, and learning, to make people happy. Experiments and lessons from the engineering organization showing continuous improvement of HR-related processes and topics.

Matti Klasson
on Mar 31, 2015
Q&A with Patrick Kua About Talking with Tech Leads

When developers become Tech Leads they have to find a balance between leading teams and continuing to do technical work. The book Talking with Tech Leads contains stories from Tech Leads on situations, challenges and approaches for leading teams. It explores the role and activities of technical leaders, and provides suggestions how to deal with responsibilities that come with technical leadership.

Ben Linders
on Mar 07, 2015
Learn or Lose: Agile Coaching and Organizational Survival

How can established organizations avoid being disrupted into oblivion? What are the key cultural and mental barriers to real learning and productive change? How can Agile approaches and coaching help, and how should they be customized to local conditions? Dan Prager explores the issues and gives a guided tour of helpful models and approaches.

Daniel Prager
on Jan 22, 2015
Q&A with John Sonmez on His Book on Soft Skills

The book “Soft Skills - The software developer's life manual” addresses interesting topics for professional software developers. The book aims to help developers to become better programmers, more valuable employees, and happier and healthier people. An interview with John Sonmez on managing careers, remote working, mentoring, getting more work done, negotiating salaries and positive thinking.

Ben Linders
on Jan 03, 2015
Q&A with Jeff Sutherland on Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time

In his new book Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time, Jeff Sutherland explains how the Scrum framework can be used as a general business practice to accelerate work of all kinds. An interview with Jeff about using Scrum outside software development, characteristics of great teams, increasing happiness, product owner teams, and on experiences from applying Scrum for education.

Ben Linders
on Nov 05, 2014
The Agile Coaches' Coach Shares Her View on SAFe

This article conveys one agile coach’s journey coming to terms with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). Lyssa Adkins shares her thoughts about SAFe and the Agile Manifesto from the viewpoint of the discipline of agile coaching. She explains how using biased views can help us to look out wider and farther to develop a "Yes AND" approach, combining SAFe with Scrum.

Lyssa Adkins
on Oct 06, 2014
Q&A with Jurgen Appelo on Management 3.0 Workout

The book Management 3.0 Workout by Jurgen Appelo contains games, practices, stories and tools that can be used to improve management in organizations. Managers can use the book to develop skills for servant leadership and increase employee engagement. Agile teams can adopt management practices described in the book to improve team work and collaboration helping them to become self-organizing.

Ben Linders
on Sep 09, 2014