Short iterations can cause Agile teams to lose focus and begin oscillating rather than iterating. This can happen from several perspectives—business, technical, user—and it’s something that Agile teams need to be aware of and guard against. When customers change their minds on an user interface issue over and over again—oscillation may be the issue. When [...]
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Putting Lipstick on a Bulldog
When outcomes are uncertain, answers hard to devise, That’s the time to form a team, tap dreams, and improvise.… Putting lipstick on a bulldog won’t transform enough, Makeup can’t hide everything; change takes deeper stuff. (e-volve!: Succeeding in the Digital Culture of Tomorrow, Rosabeth Moss Kanter 2001). In, e-volve!, Kanter sends two clear messages: there [...]
Adaptive Leadership–Continuous Change
All of us fall into clichéd phrases about the constancy and pervasiveness of change—yet our conceptual framework and management practices still view change as an exception. Most of our concepts, practices, and tools are geared to environments in which equilibrium is the normal condition and changes are the exception. Extreme, high-speed, high-change environments are just [...]
Don’t Plan, Speculate
One thing people are learning is that you can’t plan uncertainty away. Plans are good for things we know, or things that we may have some control over. However uncertainty—and its close cousin’s ambiguity and velocity—defy planning. When I originally introduced my Adaptive Life Cycle in Adaptive Software Development, the three high-level phases were Speculate, [...]
Balancing Adaptability and Predictability
One of the most vexing issues for executives and managers is balancing the need for both predictability and adaptability in software delivery. While this might seem like an either/or issue, the solutions are really both/and ones. In presentations I often ask the question, “How many of you have been on Agile teams and were asked [...]
The Ambidextrous Organization
The Agile community has struggled to find a model for transforming large organizations to an Agile approach to software delivery and face a more daunting struggle in striving towards enterprise agility. Should we strive to convert everyone in a large organization to Agile? If not, what parts should be converted and which left to their [...]
Adaptable Management Videos
Here are three very interesting video segments done by James Franklin, a Dell VP, and Gary Hamel, visiting professor at the London business school and co-founder of management innovation eXchange. How can IT organizations adapt? How will social media change organizations? What are the biggest challenges for organizations today? These 5-minute each videos provide a [...]
Affiliations
- APLN.org - Cofounder & Board Member
- Agile Alliance - Cofounder
