Of course, “anything more than ‘barely sufficient’ process is waste,” but what does that mean for your team, or my next project? In this 60 minute presentation from the APLN Leadership Summit at Agile2006, Todd Little shared a model to help choose the right “flavour” of Agile for different kinds of projects, and discussed the importance of ‘steering’ throughout the project’s duration.
Archive for February, 2008
Context-Driven Agile Leadership: Managing Complexity and Uncertainty
Posted by Christophe on February 19, 2008
Posted in Agile2006, Todd Little, Videos | Tagged: Agile2006, Todd Little, Videos | Leave a Comment »
Little and Spayd on Agile and Organizational Change
Posted by Christophe on February 19, 2008
Agile, once the territory of “early adopters” is coming into the mainstream and meeting resistance. Does this mean Agile can’t work in more traditional teams and organizations? Not necessarily, say coaches Michael Spayd and Joe Little, in this InfoQ interview taped at Agile2006. What’s needed is an awareness of the need to facilitate organizational change.
Watch the video here.
Posted in Agile2006, Change, Joseph Little, Leadership, Management, Michael Spayd, Videos | Tagged: Agile 2006, Change Management, Joseph Little, Leadership, Management, Michael Spayd, Videos | Leave a Comment »
InfoQ: Fiat Lux
Posted by Christophe on February 19, 2008
There has been a lot of complaints lately about the inability to stream the videos from the InfoQ web site.
According to their web site, this is now fixed.
“Good News: We have re-worked our video infrastructure to provide more reliable service. Please email bugs at infoq.com with any problems. “
Time to go back to all those videos.
Posted in Videos | Tagged: Videos | Leave a Comment »
Agile 2008 submission: the last lap
Posted by Christophe on February 19, 2008
Time to polish those drafts and propose to the committee: the agile 2008 submissions will close in less than a week on February 25, 2008.
Posted in Agile2008 | Tagged: Agile 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Functional roles, managers and individual growth in Agile contexts
Posted by Christophe on February 19, 2008
I’ve been listed as a panelist for a submission made by Rachel Weston (from Rally): Functional roles, managers and individual growth in Agile contexts.
Other panelists:
- Esther Derby
- Michael Spayd
Topic:
In this panel session, a group of industry experts will respond to questions relating to the challenges teams and organizations that are moving to Agile practices are experiencing related to functional roles and managers and individual growth and compensation.
Sample questions (final list is still being determined):
- What factors have most impacted individual growth in your organization or organizations you have worked with since the introduction of Agile practices?
- How has the adoption of Agile practices affected functional leadership within organizations?
- How do managers’ behaviors change to support with Agile practices?
- How do compensation models need to change to support Agile practices?
Posted in Agile2008, Esther Derby, Leadership, Management, Michael Spayd | Tagged: Agile 2008, Esther Derby, Leadership, Management, Michael Spayd | Leave a Comment »
Looking for talented engineers in Los Angeles
Posted by Christophe on February 18, 2008
To the jungle out there,
Gorilla Nation is the world’s largest online ad sales rep firm. We exclusively represent over 500 leading web publishers and offer integrated media and promotional programs to Fortune 500 brand advertisers.
We are looking for talented engineers to join our fast growth savanna:
- Sr Python engineers
- Sr PHP engineers
- Sr Ruby engineers
- Sr QA automation engineers
If customer collaboration, job satisfaction, team work, automated build, continuous integration, automated testing, pair programming, 2 week iterations, retrospectives, continuous improvement are as important to you than it is to me, then we need to talk! Email me at chrislouvion@yahoo.com.
GN is headquartered in sunny Los Angeles. So when you’re not working, you can enjoy the beach, good surfing, the Hollywood crowd, and a lot lot more…
Posted in Gorilla Nation | Tagged: Gorilla Nation, Jobs, los angeles, Recruiting | Leave a Comment »
Quote of the day
Posted by Christophe on February 10, 2008
“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
–Edwards Deming
Posted in Quotes, W Edwards Deming | Tagged: Quotes, W Edwards Deming | Leave a Comment »
Leadership Success Recipes for Agile in the 21st Century
Posted by Christophe on February 9, 2008
I have submitted a session as co-presenter with Jean Tabaka for the agile 2008 conference:
Leadership Success Recipes for Agile in the 21st Century
Agile was originally based on a simple recipe for success: a small team, co-located, self-organizing applying engineering practices. As a leader of such an adoption, you might think of your role as similar to a restauranteur/owner/head chef of a small restaurant: small staff, some simple recipes, able to quickly address the problems/challenges that might arise.
But now we are in the 21st Century and moving into more complex and demanding recipes for Agile. We still need success but we have moved the Agile recipe into a much bigger menu and venue. And, despite these complexities in our restaurant and recipes, we still need to be able to address the problems/challenges that might (will?) arise in this much more complex environment. Now, in your role as Executive Chef of this high-end operation, what will your recipe for success be?
Christophe Louvion of Gorilla Nation and Jean Tabaka of Rally Software present you with their cookbook of Agile for the 21st century Executive Chef. In this upbeat real-life experiences presentation, we offer the recipes that succeed; how they succeeded; and, what the amazing results were. Additionally, we intend to arm you with warning signs that your recipes for agile adoption may produce very unsatisfactory results and even flop. Think of it this way: do you want your large, resort-level operation to succeed with greater and greater complexity of Agile recipes and more demanding clientele? And, will you be prepared to face the challenges that could sabotage your efforts even before you get started? Or are you going to stay stuck in your little cafe and small staff as the only way to succeed?
Process/Mechanics
A. Welcome — Introductions and format of the presentation
B. What was the original set of recipes and venues for Agile success?—overview and level-setting for Agile of the early 21st Century.
C. As leaders in more complex organizations of the 21st Century, what are the challenges we face with applying the orignial recipe?—Q&A about current challenges
D. What were the challenges and audacious results of one 21st Century Agile adoption?—Christophe Louvion presenting his use of Agile to bring about 400% improvement in productivity.
E. What were the challenges and adoption failures of another 21st Century Agile adoption?—Jean Tabaka presenting her 12 Agile Adoption Failure modes.
F. Given these results of success and failure what tools must you be prepared to bring into your organization?—development infrastructure, testing infrastructure, reporting and tracking infrastructure
G. Additionally, what organizational changes must you be prepared to make?—scaling agile throughout your organization, outside of IT and around IT? New roles for scaling, Scrum of Scrums, Meta Scrum, Organizational Implementation Backlog
H. Given these successes and failures, what recipes for success are you prepared to embrace?—Q&A with the group about what they have experienced and how we can make successful recipes going forward.
I. Close—Final Q&A
Posted in Agile2008, Jean Tabaka, Leadership, Scrum | Tagged: Agile 2008, Jean Tabaka, Leadership, Scrum, scrum of scrums | 1 Comment »
Managers are from Mars, Performance Appraisals from Venus
Posted by Christophe on February 2, 2008
I attended to the Agile Bazaar event on January 31 2008 at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute where Mary Poppendieck presented “Appraisals and Compensation: The Elephant in the Room“. She will likely do presentation it again at the Agile 2008 conference in toronto. Not to spoil it, I will only give the thread line.
Mary went through a brief history of performance appraisals. While it all started 2,000 years ago in china, appraisals became universal (in the US) in the 90s.
So if every companies uses them, they must be extremely useful, right? Unfortunately not.
Mary exposed 8 underlying purposes supporting the mechanism (to name a few: motivatation of employees, identification of candidates for promotion, identification of training needs) and 6 faulty assumptions (including motivation as an external factor, focusing on the individual -or team- rather than the system and the delay of mainly negative feedback) .
Mary says that there is no valid research showing benefits of performance appraisals. Simply said, “it doesn’t work“. Her biggest complain is that appraisals target individuals (sometimes teams) rather the system itself. She also condemns judgment rather than feedback (system dynamic).
Mary went over the false assumptions behind individual pay-for-performance (money, motivation, individual assessment), and the negative effects they have on the system.
She finished by a case study done by HP across 13 organizations over a year 4 year period where each division implemented a different type of incentive plan. The results are just mind boggling. They all failed and got canceled.
So what is she proposing to do instead?
Provide every day for
- clear goals and priorities
- team work
- pride
- feedback
- cadence
- continuous improvement
The key here is that yearly of bi-annual appraisals are replaced by a daily engagement of management with the team. Promotions and salary adjustment are evaluated (team wide) on a regular basis – rather than once per year.
Mary closed saying that focus on training, delegation of the decision making process within an egalitarian culture, good pay and reciprocal commitment between the employees and the company are the pillars for high performance.
She also discussed a case study made around a large experiment done by HP. Wanna hear the punch line? Come by agile 08…
Now, if your organization is still mandating appraisal, check out Jeff Sutherland’s review process.
Posted in Agile Bazaar, Dilbert, Mary Poppendieck, Team Performance | Tagged: Agile Bazaar, Dilbert, Mary Poppendieck, Team Performance | 5 Comments »
