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Effective Agility: Three Suggestions to Change How You and Your Team Work, Part 2

Johanna Rothman

In Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1 , I said that real agile approaches require cultural change to focus on flow efficiency, where we focus on watching the work, not the people. If you and your team have been practicing real agility, you might say these ideas barely show any agility at all. That's fine.

Agile 71
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Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1

Johanna Rothman

I see many teams and team members who say, “Agile stinks. ” When I ask people what's happening, they say: We're doing an agile death march because someone else already told us what we have to do and the date it's due. And don't get me started on how coaches tend to do life coaching instead of support for agility.)

Agile 88
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Tired of Fake Agility? Choose When to Experiment and When to Deliver

Johanna Rothman

I have a new book: Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility. I wrote it because I'm concerned about what I see in too many supposedly agile teams: Crazy-long backlogs and roadmaps. Worse, sometimes the team doesn't demo or deliver. The post Tired of Fake Agility?

Agile 85
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Agile Approaches Offer Strategic Advantage; Agile Tools are Tactics, Part 2

Johanna Rothman

So when does it make sense to customize your agile approach to gain a strategic advantage? They want an agile approach, so they started with Scrum. The first was not waiting for the end of an iteration to demo or release. They demo'd every week on Wednesday mornings and then they released after the demo. We do what works.”

Agile 105
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Effective Agility: Three Ways to Change Your Team’s Project Culture, Part 3

Johanna Rothman

In Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1 , I said that real agile approaches require cultural change to focus on flow efficiency , where we watch the flow of the work , not the people doing tasks. Can you create an agile culture for your team even if you can't change how the organization works? 1,2 and so on.

Agile 81
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With Agile Approaches, No Need to “Meet” or “Enforce” Deadlines

Johanna Rothman

He thought agile approaches would work to “meet” and “enforce” deadlines. Even when we use a non-agile approach , schedule variance doesn't make sense. Because the “teams” couldn't deliver something small, they didn't demo very often. Over months, they stopped demoing anything.

Agile 85
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Large Features and Long Deadlines Mean You Have a Gantt Chart, Not a Roadmap

Johanna Rothman

The teams want to use an agile approach so they can incorporate learning. The managers might even think this is roadmap reflects an agile approach. There's nothing about this roadmap that's agile. You can decide if you need an agile approach. Demo on a regular cadence. The managers want rigid roadmaps.

Agile 143