Elevating Katas: Driving Continuous Improvement in Organizational Topologies In the evolving landscape of software development and organizational design, Elevating Katas play a crucial role in fostering continuous improvement. These structured, repeatable exercises help teams refine their workflows, challenge inefficiencies, and push for higher performance.

In 2022, Andrew Sales (Chief Methodologist and SAFe Fellow at Scaled Agile, Inc.) was talking at the Tecnifor SAFe Day. You can find the talk here. His subject was “accelerating flow of customer value”. I want to reflect on this talk and share how we can help improve flow of customer value in SAFe systemically. This post invites you to improve SAFe beyond the solutions proposed in this talk.   

Scrum is often implemented at the team level, which can limit achieving business agility at scale. Moving beyond this "team-level agility" to a more holistic approach fosters in-team and inter-team collaboration, aligning with the "second wave of Agile".

This blog describes how Business Agility can be achieved with Product Management. The Org Topologies™ map helps to understand this concept.

Last week I was invited to give a lecture at the Free University of Amsterdam at the faculty for Digital Business Innovation. I consider it a real honor to teach the students of a University. The lecture triggered a lot of thoughts about the relevance of teaching Agile/Scrum.

This case study analyzes the transformation journey using Org Topologies™ Scans and focuses on the Business Banking Hub. The article is valuable if you want to understand how Org Topologies™ can help improve organizational design.

In our quest to improve the working place, we propose to view an organization as an ecosystem. #OrgTopologies is a framework agnostic thinking tool that will allow managers to purposefully design organizations for high performance. In this article, we describe an A-level ecosystem and how to improve it.

The question we ask ourselves in this article is, "To what extent is Kniberg's graph still relevant to improving the performance of large-scale agile team collaboration?".

This article describes how I used the Org Topologies™ Map to coach a team toward ownership of their own agile transformation journey. Read this article to learn how Org Topologie™s can be applied to coaching the agnostic, framework-free thinking tool.

Analyzing the Agile fluency model from the perspective of Org Topologies.

In this article, we will analyze the famous “Tribes and Squads” model (also known as a “Spotify model”) in terms of where it fits on the archetype map.

Org Topologies™ is a mapping of recognizable organizational archetypes in product development. Understanding the archetypes will help you to navigate your agile transformation.

Org Topologies (OT) is a framework for strategic organizational design and change. It is described as the first “human-centric plus AI-friendly” approach to organizational change. This means it emphasizes the human side of change (people need to own their change and find it engaging) while anticipating the integration of AI into the workforce​.

When you aspire to a Scrum Master role, some form of certification on your resume is a must. Scrum.org offers the acclaimed PSM learning journey to support Scrum Masters to professionalise their skills. I am a Professional Scrum Trainer for scrum.org and I have trained hundreds of Scrum Masters over the past few years.  Newcomers start their career with a PSM-I class to gain an understanding of Professional Scrum and the essence of the role of the Scrum Master. I observe that many experienced Scrum Masters hesitate to join a PSM-II class. Possibly that's because it is unclear to many what the PSM-II training has to offer.

When I coach, consult and teach classes, I often get questions about creating an agile maturity tool or defining agile maturity metrics. Agile Maturity metrics are used by many businesses to better understand their present agile practices and monitor to improve them. I understand the need for this kind of metric. I also noticed that the purpose and value of agile maturity metrics are misunderstood. This article will help you to find agile maturity metrics that bring value and offers a free maturity tool to download.

Quand on parle de Scrum et d’Agilité, nous sommes habitués à penser à l’Amérique et à l’Europe, et non à l’Afrique. Je dois avouer que je suis totalement ignorant du niveau de Scrum et de l’Agile en Afrique. Inutile de dire que j’étais excité d’être invité en Côte d’Ivoire pour une formation PSM-1 et PSPO-1 dans la ville d’Abidjan.

When talking about applying Scrum and Agile, we are hardwired to think about America and Europe, not about Africa. I must confess I am totally ignorant about the status of Scrum and Agile in Africa. Needless to say, I was excited to be invited to Ivory Coast for a PSM-1 and PSPO-1 training in the city of Abidjan.

Scrum.org provides high-quality level professional training. Professional Scrum Trainers are top-notch Scrum professionals delivering excellent training and training materials.

In an agile context, we use metrics to set performance goals, measure current conditions, define small improvement experiments and measure the effectiveness of the experiments in order to inspect and adapt goals and determine the next steps.

I work in “the transformation business”. The Agile transformation business to be more precise. The value I aim to deliver is: Improve the internal organisation of companies so that they get better at making their dreams come true.

I was hired by a bank to help them to get started with agile and Scrum...

As part of the Scrum Tapas video series, Professional Scrum Trainer Roland Flemm explores the myth that a Daily Scrum is status meeting and reveals in 2 minutes how to make your Daily Scrum event more valuable.

A problem with many teams is that they are not living in an environment where opportunistic discovery is supported or promoted. Teams are there to deliver, which we measure by monitoring their velocity. This is sadly a common practice. 

Я Скрам Мастер и, узнавая, в чем заключается эта роль, я выяснил, что Скрам Мастерство - сложная профессия.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

At many customers I visit, I see a lot of effort being put into classification and managing bugs.

Несмотря на то, что глобально адаптация Скрам в настоящее время составляет 75% (источник: 14-й доклад о состоянии Agile-2020), многим по-прежнему трудно понять профессию Скрам Мастера.

Even though the global Scrum adoption is now at 75% (source: 14th State of Agile report 2020), the Scrum Master profession is still difficult to grasp for ma

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In this story, I describe and debrief a difficult moment I experienced as a coach. In addition to this writeup being my personal reflection, it might serve as a source of learning for you.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

During a 20/20 vision on my writings, I discovered clusters of knowledge that are essential to Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches: Genuine coaching techniques, knowledge of psychological principles and above all, understanding and developing “Self” awareness.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

Like many Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Agile Managers, I am beginning to understand organizations are complex adaptive systems.

In this episode, I will try to show how understanding mental models can significantly improve the abilities of leaders like Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches and Managers. This is because Mental Models are at the core of knowledge and learning.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my discoveries via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In my previous 2 episodes of this series on Systems Thinking, I elaborated on what Systems Thinking is and on the Wicked Problems Systems Thinking is trying to solve. In this episode, I want to explore Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS).

Before and during the Sprint, effort needs to be put into coordination to ensure the Scrum Teams deliver a working integrated product. This situation can be improved with Multi-team Product Backlog Refinement sessions.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my experiences via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In this article, I want to clarify the need for agility in modern businesses and what agility in organisational design actually is.

In my daily life as a Scrum Master, I witness many crazy situations. I want to share my experiences via this comic series featuring Koos Coach, the silly Scrum Master struggling to understand and master Scrum.

In a series of blog posts, I want to share how you can use Systems Thinking to resolve complex problems.

In a series of blog posts, I want to share how you can use Systems Thinking to resolve complex problems such as software teams not delivering the right software fast enough.

A customer I was working with asked me to help out with the intake process for recruiting a new Scrum Master and a new Product Owner. I asked them what they had so far. They provided a clear job description describing what they wanted to see from the candidates.

This video is a presentation from Agile Week Riga titled, Iterating Toward Professional Scrum.