Agile Complexification Inverter

Visual.ly Infographic Understanding why an organization thinks it needs to change is enlightening.  Many times the people at the bottom ranks of the organization have no idea the driving forces that necessitate a change.   As a group brainstorm a list of possible reasons for the change. Dialogue on the difference between change and transition.  How long does change take?  What is a transition?   Bridges Transition Model :  Ending - Neutral Zone - New Beginning. Dialogue on the difference between satisfiers and dissatisfaction in the workplace (Herzberg's  Two-Factor theory ). See Gallup's Q12 Employee Engagement survey . First just capture all the reasons that might be the answer to - Why change? Typical reasons (if you need to prime the pump - or when the answers slow down - throw one of these out to head in a different direction). Current process just doesn’t work Decrease time to market for new products Cost reducti...

Does it exist? Health care in the USA is under great pressure to change these days.  So regardless of which pole of the political sphere you personally are drawn toward, the landscape underneath your view point will be changing.  One could ask why.  It is an interesting line of inquiry.  Will the fact that health care is just too costly, increasing at exponential rates, and leaving an ever enlarging number of americans out of the "care" system suffice for the moment? So this domain of the american system is being pushed off a proverbial cliff into a turbulent troubled sea of change.  I wonder - do we have any system models that would describe what might help in these situations? Here's a case in point, a CEO announce a spur of the moment policy change, a move toward transparency.  Why?  Perhaps he was frustrated with the ill-rational behavior of "the system".  And decide that a move toward transparency was a rational behavior. Florida Hosp...

What do the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays do to your teams tempo and cadence? For most US teams this holiday period from mid November to after the first of January is hectic and disruptive in various ways.  This calls for a Holiday Stratagem.  A trick to allow the team to have some semblance of continuity and flow during these times. The Sontaran Stratagem - Doctor Who To discuss this stratagem let's first define some terms: Tempo - the rate of workdays to calendar days Cadence - the beat of the sprint events to fall upon the same calendar day of the week Sprint duration -  in work days (in this example I'll use 10 work days) Sprint length - the length of calendar days between two sprints (14 days for the example 2 week sprint) What do you value more?  The ability to deliver more work in the short term -or- the ability to predict long term the capability of the team to deliver that work?  Or perhaps something else, like teaching a new te...

The software industry has created a knowledge and expectation of product versions.  Previously the closest industry to create this mindset was the automotive industry - they had the model year concept.  Typically they added nice to have "bells or whistles", but rarely added true features each iteration of the auto model year. Software was a new paradigm, back in the 1980s, this industry started using a version numbering scheme (major dot minor). For example, Windows 3.1, the first version to truly work and deliver value to the customer. What happens when a company moves back to the model year concept of versioning in the software industry?  Does it help customer to understand the expectations of value being delivered?  Does it create more cognitive load for decision makers? Here's an example, you tell me; it is May of 2013 , is this the best move for Company X. Coming Soon: SharePoint 2010 The long-awaited upgrade to Sha...

People just don't like change.  Case in point, all the hubbub over the new iPhone 5 lightening adapter plug.  So many people are upset that the connector is changing from the 9 year old iPod 30 pin adaptor to the new lightning adaptor.  Yet at the same time the iPhone 5 pre-orders have record sells ( 2 million in first 24 hrs ). Why did Apple force this change on it's loyal customer base?  Dont they know we humans don't adapt well to changes.  Oh yes, we want the new shinny iPhone but we want it to stay the same AND get better. Maybe this picture will give you a clue as to why Apple changed the connector. It shows a typical iPhone and it's 30 pin connector, with a Raspberry Pi.  The Raspberry Pi is a full fledged computer on a board.  Take a look at the board and the most obvious thing is all the connectors.  The interface connections are the largest things.  They occupy the most space. Raspberry Pi & iPhone compared The ...

Compare Titanic to Costa Concordia :: 100 yrs apart - what have we learned? Titanic has 19th century tech but barely able to use it to the fullest ( wireless radio - morse code - very small message payload - poor distress procedures & discipline in industry).  Used 18th c. tech - flares to signal distress - but ignored by closest vessel.  Left the ship watches binoculares in port (I've done that).  Capt'n made errors in judgement - full steam ahead through known ice flow with no binos on watch... stupid move. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-extraordinary-story-of-the-titanic http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/costa_concordia The Costa Concorda's captain made several big blunders in judgement.  He may wish he had gone down with his ship, as Capt'n Smith of the Titanic did. While both captains made blunders of judgement, the state of the art of sea distaster has changed in 100 years.  The two disasters are not very compara...

One way to scale Scrum is to get one team functioning (mature team) and then populate new teams by dividing the original members up amongst the newly created teams. Does this work?  I think the answer is both yes and no.  Does science have any analogies to study that would help us to predict what factors lead to the yes answer and away from the no answer? The Founder Effect - an effect that evolutionary biology predicts from the classic theory of evolution.  The most adaptable will survive.  We agilist believe in this theory.  Here's a study of the founder effect in Caribbean lizards .  The study reflects that the founders of a population have a significant  effect upon the new population.  However the environment also has a significant effect. To draw the conclusion the studies author,  Schoener said: “The answer we found is that founder effects can leave a persistent signal as generations replace one another over time,...

A short little comparison of Organizational Change models. There is Kurt Lewin's 3 stage model:  Unfreezing , Change , Freeze . See: Frontiers in Group Dynamics (1947). A change towards a higher level of group performance is frequently short-lived, after a “shot in the arm”, group life soon returns to the previous level. This indicates that it does not suffice to define the objective of planned change in group performance as the reaching of a different level. Permanency of the new level, or permanency for a desired period, should be included in the objective. -- Kurt Lewin Then there is the most well known:  John Kotter's 8 Steps model. Establish a sense of urgency . Create the guiding coalition . Develop a vision and strategy . Communicate the change vision. Empower employees for broad-based action . Generate short-term wins . Consolidate gains and produce more change. Anchor new approaches in the culture . These were developed from Kotter's study of fai...

If your number one reason to switch to Agile software development is - Time to Market - you should come up with a better reason. Dig deeper. Ask WHY this is important to your customers (not just your companies bottom line). In " The 12 Key Reasons Companies Adopt Agile " by Mike Cottmeyer notes this as reason #1. While I agree with his list of reasons, I don't agree that those reasons are always sufficient to motivate people to change. 1. Faster time to market – Lots of folks that decide to go agile are pretty fed up with 18 month delivery cycles that quite often deliver the wrong products to market… one’s that our customers just aren’t interested in buying. The idea of two week delivery cycles and quarterly release cadences is pretty appealing. Our markets and our competition are just moving too fast… we’ve got to get better at getting working product out the door faster. If the best reason your CEO can come up with is to increase the rate of product deliver,...