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The Real Question We Should Be Asking About Agile Transformation

November 1, 2024
Despite massive investments in Digital Transformation, with $6.3 trillion projected by 2024, failure rates remain high—around 84%. The issue? Many large organizations lean heavily on scaling frameworks like SAFe or LeSS, but without adapting them to their unique needs, they struggle to achieve Agile success. Rather than simply adopting a framework, organizations should focus on evolving it to fit their specific, changing context. The key question isn’t “How can I adopt Framework X?” but “How can I evolve my framework to meet my organization’s needs?”
Blog Post

Applying Systems Thinking in Product Definition for Agile Organizations

September 24, 2024
In my previous post on Product Definition, which you can read here, I introduced the basics of how products—both internal and external—are defined in an agile organization. Today, I’m excited to share a deeper dive into this concept through a new video, where I walk you through how we apply Systems Thinking in the Creating Agile Organizations (CAO) approach.
Blog Post

Agile Organization Design: Moving Beyond Size Logic

July 10, 2024
In the late 90s, many companies adopted a 150-person rule for organizational units to maintain manageability and cohesion. However, this approach often led to fragmented products and complex management structures, making strategic execution a challenge. Today, a new idea is emerging. Instead of splitting units by size, companies are forming dedicated product groups with full P&L responsibility, encompassing entire product families. This shift has streamlined strategic units, reduced reporting lines, and enhanced agility in responding to market changes.
Blog Post

Redefining Agility: Evolving Your Operating Model as a Scrum Master

June 5, 2024
As a Scrum Master, it's time to rethink our approach to agility. Instead of forcing strategies into predefined frameworks, evolve your operating model to align with unique strategies and empower your teams. This fundamental shift creates a dynamic organization that continually evolves and improves. In this blog, I share seven steps to help you out.
Blog Post

Don’t Confuse Product-Level and Organizational Adaptability in Agile Organizations

May 31, 2024
In the Creating Agile Organizations prototype organization, semi-independent product groups and shared services coexist. Product groups are operationally coupled by shared services but functionally decoupled from each other, that is: actions by a product group does not negatively impact the ability of other product groups to achieve their function. This design ensures that product groups can make necessary changes without being negatively impacted by other groups. Understanding and implementing both product-level and organizational adaptability is crucial for modern agile organizations. By balancing tight and loose coupling appropriately, organizations can remain resilient, responsive, and competitive in ever-changing markets. This dual-level adaptability allows organizations to thrive by continuously optimizing value and enhancing the customer experience.
Blog Post

Your Path To Agility

May 19, 2023
The Creating Agile Organizations approach is about designing your own organizational framework and coaching its adoption. It is important to note that it is different from frameworks like Scrum, LeSS or SAFe, which have specific structures, rules, events, and artefacts to build upon. Instead, Creating Agile Organizations provides none of that, but provides two sets of guidelines that draw upon decades of academic research and practical experience in organizations similar to yours.
Blog Post

How Can an Organization Develop its Agile capabilities?

April 12, 2023
Developing Agile capabilities within an organization requires unlearning ineffective practices and aligning the company’s structure, processes, people practices, and reward systems. The importance of these different components to reinforce each other is illustrated through the analogy of developing a healthy lifestyle.
Blog Post

Building for Agility: The Role of Commodity Platforms

April 10, 2023
At scale, many teams can use the shared platform functionality. When that can be done on a self-service basis, it supports autonomy and improves product delivery flow. But when the platform group holds all the power and the teams need to request the product group to develop product-specific functionality themselves, it can create a bottleneck in the development process. By eliminating reciprocal interdependencies and creating a commodity platform, product groups can focus on their unique features and the platform can provide the necessary functionality without getting in the way. It’s a win-win situation for everyone involved, and collaboration and smart processes can keep everything running smoothly.
Blog Post

Unlocking Agile Success: Aligning Your Organizational Design with Strategic Focus

March 21, 2023
Designing an Agile organisation is difficult without a framework - it involves making trade-offs between various design options. But did you know that your organization's strategic focus plays a crucial role in determining the right trade-offs? By combining the traits of an Agile organization with your strategic focus, you can identify the necessary capabilities to succeed.
Blog Post

Unlocking the Power of Systems Thinking: How to Design High-Performing Systems That Delight Customers

March 8, 2023
Systems Thinking is one of the key concepts required for successful agile organization design. It provides a valuable approach to organization design that can help organizations better understand the interrelationships between different elements within the system. By recognizing feedback loops and boundaries, organizations can design systems that are more efficient, effective, and resilient.
Blog Post

Are you Familiar with Agile Organization Design?

February 28, 2023
A proper Agile organizational design is critical to achieving your business strategy, and you need to redesign your organization when your capabilities and strategy are incompatible. Redesigning your organization involves rethinking its structure, processes, and people to ensure that they align with your strategy and capabilities.
Blog Post

What does your Team Optimize For?

November 11, 2022
What does your Team optimize for? Optimizing for adaptability requires certain types of teams, is your team set up in line with the goals of your organization? You can use this canvas to plot a team’s current position and then evaluate how it can improve. It gets more fun when you plot many teams relative to each other on the canvas and use that information in an overall retrospective to find the balance that works for you.
Blog Post

Designing the Product Owner Role

June 11, 2022
In this blog, a short description of one workshop from Chapter 11: Guiding The Product Ownership. Misconceptions about the PO role often lead to reduced agility, development bottlenecks, and teams that do not understand the customer domain well enough to make autonomous decisions during a Sprint. 
Blog Post

How to Select Scrum Patterns

January 4, 2020
In my earlier article, I explained what Scrum Patterns are and why they could be useful for you in your transformation. In this blog, I discuss how to select and use the Scrum Patterns from the Pattern Languages.
Blog Post

From Sheep Dog to Lap Dog

January 23, 2018
Back in the early days of Scrum, the Scrum Master role was exciting. The days of the pigs & chickens, the days when being a Scrum Master was considered dangerous. In those times there was the saying a dead Scrum Master is a useless Scrum Master  And even today I still use that when selecting a Scrum Master to work with.  If you never got fired as a Scrum Master then you probably did not show enough courage to achieve breakthrough improvements.
Blog Post

Common Mistakes when Scaling Scrum

July 19, 2016
These days scaling Scrum is a hot topic. How can I use Scrum to deliver a big product with multiple teams? The most common approach I see at my customers is scaling Scrum by adding more Scrum teams with a Product Owner and Scrum Master per team.