Meet Sara, a driven product director who’s always up for a challenge. But with ambitious targets to attract 10,000 new clients, increase customer satisfaction by 35%, and keep top talents on board, she’s starting to worry if her organization is up for the task.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

The fifth blog, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations - A Systemic Approach, by Cesario Ramos & Ilia Pavlichenko.

The third blog, in a blog series about the upcoming book: Creating Agile Organizations - A Systemic Approach

First, in a blog series about the upcoming book:

This article is about how we improved on the Spotify inspired model in one tribe inside a Large Dutch Bank.

In this 3rd article, I build on the previous two articles and give an example of how to use the two Pattern Languages to develop your pattern sequence.

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.

In 2017, I was talking to the head of the Agile Coach Group of a large bank. She asked me to come over to work with her and help to roll out their standard way of working across all branches in Europe.

In this little blog I share some tips for multi-team Product Backlog refinement.

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.

Some companies develop 1 product with 10s to 100s of people using Scrum. And they do that without adding any roles, events or processes to Scrum. They can do this because they use an organisational design that optimises for the right goals.

Over the last weeks I've been working on a paper about the role of a Business Analysts within Large Scale Scrum, and I thought I'd write a little post on it too, here it goes.

I was talking to a company that is implementing the Spotify model and needed some help.

In this little blog I want to share a simple canvas that I use to kick-off agile adoption and answer the following questions:

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.

Have you ever seen a Sprint Backlog that can be reused across Sprints? I have!

I was coaching a number of teams and their Sprint Reviews were boring status meetings and few stakeholders attended.

Recently I gave a talk on the ScrumDayEurope 2014 conference.