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Enterprise Agile

The GREAT Enterprise Agile Coaching Mistake

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The GREAT Enterprise Agile Coaching Mistake

I have a good friend and colleague who works in a rather large enterprise. Among others, she’s tasked with bringing “agile” into the organization and “transforming” their work. She’s largely leading the effort, so has a tremendous amount of responsibility for its success.

They’ve chosen Scrum for this effort.

They’ve engaged a rather large agile coaching firm to help them “go Agile”.

So far their strategy has been along the following lines:

  1. Hire full-time agile coaches
  2. Do a little training for “Leaders and Managers”, less than a ½ day, usually 60-90 minutes
  3. Spin-up Scrum teams (a little training), with Technical Leads as ScrumMasters and limited Product Owners (time and skill)
  4. Start sprinting
  5. Hire more agile coaches
  6. Spin up more Scrum teams…start sprinting
  7. Rinse & repeat…

To-date, there are more than 50+ newly minted Scrum teams who are dutifully sprinting away creating lots and lots of value.

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Actively Coaching Organizational Leadership

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Actively Coaching Organizational Leadership

In a previous post, I tried to create a “Call to Arms” for Scrum Coaches and Trainers to do much more than simple, team-based training. While that seems to be a great deal of our focus, I don’t think it’s creating the environment and landscape for agile methods and Scrum in particular to “Transform the world of work”.

In early May 2014, I was at the Scrum Gathering in New Orleans and hanging out with a significant part of the CST and CSC community. A great deal of the discussion on how to “Transform the world of work” is focused on training and certifications. To be honest, I’m quite disappointed on the lip service that is largely given to the world of agile coaching. And coaching “downward”, toward the team, is most of that coaching focus.

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Scaled Agile Framework - Is it SAFe?

I attended an Agile Leadership Network (ALN-Raleigh/Durham) meeting a few weeks ago where Dean Leffingwell presented the Scaled Agile Framework. It was a solid meeting and quite thought provoking.

As with any "good" meeting, I went away thinking about what I heard, the contrasts against my own experience, and tried to sort through my reactions - both good & bad.

I've written some of them down in this article. I hope it comes off even handed, while still clearly communicating my concerns.

I guess the point is: Is SAFe...safe? I'm not quite sure yet ;-)

Thanks for listening,

Bob.