Viewing entries tagged
organizational transformation

Revisiting Transformation Failure Patterns

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Revisiting Transformation Failure Patterns

John Kotter wrote a Harvard Business Review piece in 1995, over 25 years ago, entitled Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail. In it, he listed eight failure patterns or errors that often undermine organizational change and transformation efforts.

Now, at the time, agile ways of working were in their infancy and this was ~5-years before the writing of the Agile Manifesto. But when I came across it again, the article made me reflect on how many of these errors are still relevant and active today?

  • Error #1: Not Establishing a Great Enough Sense of Urgency

  • Error #2: Not Creating a Powerful Enough Guiding Coalition

  • Error #3: Lacking a Vision

  • Error #4: Under-communicating the Vision by a Factor of Ten

  • Error #5: Not Removing Obstacles to the New Vision

  • Error #6: Not Systemically Planning for and Creating Short-Term Wins

  • Error #7: Declaring Victory Too Soon

  • Error #8: Not Anchoring Changes in the Corporation’s Culture

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A Bakers Dozen of Inconvenient Truths that Adopting Scrum Usually Exposes

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A Bakers Dozen of Inconvenient Truths that Adopting Scrum Usually Exposes

I’ve occasionally shared blog posts related to questions from my good friend Lee Copeland. Lee will occasionally send me an email asking a question related to an article or talk idea that he has. In this case, he asked me about – “bad things that Scrum typically exposes”?

He sent me this list to illustrate the sorts of things he was looking for:

  1. weak people (who managed to hide),
  2. time stolen (by people for pet projects), and
  3. Parkinson's Law (work expands to fill the time allotted).

I thought about it for a couple of days, as I didn’t necessarily resonate with his short list. In fact, my initial reply to Lee was that – Scrum exposes EVERYTHING; so making a list could be a long effort. But upon reflection, I’ve created a “Top 10” Baker’s Dozen of things (challenges, dysfunctions, problems, etc.) that I typically see when organizations transform to Scrum.

It’s not intended to be exhaustive, but I hope you find it thought provoking…

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The Agile Project Manager—Voila: The Great Reveal

The Agile Project Manager—Voila: The Great Reveal

I remember the day as if it was yesterday. It was my first sprint review at a company I’d just joined as an agile coach. They’d been ‘doing’ Scrum for several years and I had gotten the general sense that they were well disciplined and mature agilists.

So when they scheduled a series of sprint reviews to expose the x-team efforts of their latest sprint cycle, I was understandably excited. So I got into the room early to get a good seat and was eager with anticipation.

Gradually, the room filled and it became quite noisy, which only drove my anticipation higher. Then the first team took “the stage” and began their review. They popped up some PowerPoint slides and away they went…