agile transition

Teams, when truly empowered, will always make better decisions than any one individual. Where can you empower teams as you adopt agile?

Is your agile team not reaching their potential? They may be suffering from internal dysfunctions that contribute to less than optimal results. When core dysfunctions are left to fester, the end result may be a late or failed project-and the cause will be chalked up to “that's just the way agile sometimes is.” Based on his coaching work with hundreds of agile teams, Bob Hartman presents an agile team dysfunction model and identifies the five most common dysfunctions-Leave me in my silo, When we communicate it’s only by email, Others make commitments for us, Don't blame me because I didn't do it, and Worship the heroes. Bob shows how to determine dysfunctions, communicate them, and, most importantly, help teams get past them. Learn how teams can reach their full potential and even achieve greatness once they fully understand their weaknesses, and embrace practices and efforts necessary to overcome them.

Where agile thrives, great coaching is present. Whether formal or informal, coaching is a key ingredient for successful and lasting agility. Unfortunately, many people call themselves coaches yet they fail to do any real, helpful coaching. David Hussman presents tactics for growing coaching in your organization. He begins by focusing on finding coaching candidates-what skills and attributes they need-and then engaging them to grow their coaching capabilities. From there, David walks through pragmatic coaching tools that foster appropriate ceremony and meaningful coaching opportunities. He teaches you how to develop a process that helps teams draw on their experience while overcoming their unique constraints. Leave with new ideas for helping with backlogs, working out estimation challenges, keeping stand up meetings lively, and getting developers to stop just talking about testing and really start doing it.

The concept of software process improvement is not new. Many methods have been defined to conduct and pursue improvement. We never seem to lack for “improvement” ideas, as if they are fresh and exciting-which they often are not. Maybe that's because so much of what has been espoused through the years has not worked. Hillel Glazer examines long-held assumptions about process improvement, proposes plausible flaws, and reveals new levels of understanding that have facilitated breakthroughs in high performance. Hillel looks at what happens when there is too much focus on practices, when the underlying principles aren't honored, and when basic values aren't internalized. We see too much arguing over practices instead of working toward results-too much worrying about compliance to some dogma instead of moving forward with what’s really working.