Edgar Schein, Sloan Professor of Management Emeritus at the MIT, describes three levels of organizational culture: artifacts, the visible sign: from dress code to how employees communicate espoused beliefs: the values by which business is conducted, it can be brought out by talking to people underlying assumptions, the invisible component: hard to describe, often unconscious, […]
In my line of work, I’m often called to help an organization “go agile” or do an “agile transformation.” My first question usually gets the most awkward pause: “Why do you want to do this?” After some discussion, we often get to something like, “We need to be faster,” or “We’ve got some tight deadlines, […]
I am here to tell you a story. A story of a team that was Agile at heart, tried Scrum as methodological support to materialize that agility and discovered in Kanban the best Scrum companion to face different challenges. No, it is not a story of a team doing Scrumban, but of a team choosing […]
In Part I, we described our journey in Leading an Agile transformation for a complex hardware product development program in a highly regulated industry within a large multinational company. We didn’t consciously set out to implement ‘Agile’ or lead a scaled Agile transformation. We didn’t have a masterplan describing how we were going to deploy […]
Leading a large-scale Agile transformation is hard. It requires relentless focus and discipline to create an environment that empowers teams to deliver innovation at pace. There are thousands of publications describing how this should be done in theory, yet not so many on how to translate that theory into practice. The majority of those that […]
Virtually all companies use Key Performance Indicators (KPI) but too many are measuring the wrong things. The result is wasted effort and misdirection because choosing the wrong metrics rewards the wrong behaviors. U.S. banking giant Wells Fargo learned this the hard way. They incentivized associates based on a key metric: the number of accounts opened. […]
Previously, I wrote about Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey as a mental model for evolutionary change management. It was perfect for my needs. Now, let me introduce you to the implementation of this mental model as an evolutionary change management tool. I use this storification technique to understand what the organization wants first (needs later) and […]
This article consists of 2 parts on how I apply the concept of Hero’s Journey to Evolutionary Change Management. In this first part, I would like to set the ground by sharing the mental model which helped me communicate better with organizational leaders when managing evolutionary change. Journey to The Unknown is Always Uncomfortable We, […]
This is an updated post/case study on the topic of achieving end-to-end flow with Customer Kanban. Many thanks to Patrick Steyaert for this insightful piece of content. Enjoy! Introduction According to the English dictionary, flow is the action, or fact, of moving along in a steady, continuous stream. In business terms, flow is when value […]
Long gone are the days when Agile was just a nerdy topic among software developers. Having witnessed the methodology’s positive effects on the quality and pace of engineering teams, a growing number of business leaders are also turning their attention to adopting Agile in their organizations. Since it revolutionized the way software products are developed, […]