Jason Little's Blog, page 6

Why Agile Breaks Your Organization

A while back I was helping a marketing department with Agile, and that’s a story for another day. This story starts with a comment from a VP who was sponsoring the problem that this marketing team was working on.

He said, “we tend to make it hard on ourselves to get work done with all of our processes. Let’s break the machine.”

The Spock in me thought, “why don’t we make however we get work done around here the actual process? Then we don’t need to worry about breaking the machine!”

Easy to s...

Minimum Viable Change Process

There are easily 40 change methods out there. If there was a best practice, shouldn’t there just be one? Throughout the last few decades where change managers roamed the world, haven’t we figured out the one process that works?

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again. We *know* we need good communication, a reason why, strong leadership, a strategy, a plan, and some level of acceptance by the people impacted by the change, but in all my readings, I’ve rarely come across writings that say...

Creating Alignment for Enterprise Transformation

Read any article about how to ensure successful change (or why changes fail), and you’re likely to see these patterns: we need communication, top-down support, strong leadership, a reason why (urgency), motivated individuals, and the right change method to follow.

There are enough change methods, models, and frameworks out there to shake a stick at, yet hundreds of articles flood the internet daily about why change fails, or what it takes to ensure successful change. I believe any change live...

Untangling the Organizational Hairball

If you’ve worked in a large organization, you know how slow and difficult it is for them to change. The thing with Enterprise Agile (or any other large organizational change), is they tend to follow the same pattern:

Appoint a centralized department to devise an enterprise-wide process, while pockets of movements emerge, and then figure out how to get other people to change, without involving those other people.

It’s this ass-backwards thinking that got our organizations into this mess in the...

Using Creative Visuals to Show Progress

In the project management world we take big projects and break them up into smaller pieces so they are less overwhelming to the people doing the work. This also makes it so we can track our progress. In Agile, we break them up into short iterations so we can create feedback loops to improve quickly.

In traditional project management there is a lot of tracking and reporting. People are hired whose sole job is to track progress, report dates, and yell at workers for not hitting the arbitrary da...

Successful Agile Transformation through Community Building

I’veworked with enough large organizations to see patterns in how they typically approach Agile Transformation:

Someone gets excited about Agile for some reason, and people who get agile , run with it. Someone in the existing hierarchical structure becomes responsible for it. Rollout team is created. Rollout plan is created. Organization becomes paralyzed by how to measure it. Consultants are fired. Organization scratches its head. VP of Agile is hired. Repeat steps 3 through 7. Organizat...

Alternatives to Agile Scaling Frameworks

Scaling Agile is a hot topic nowadays…well, most of the early adopters in Agile have already moved on from this but many organizations in the late majority are looking to scaling frameworks to help them be more Agile.

Some, including me, believe scaling frameworks do little more than reinforce the status quo, but what’s the alternative? Check out this panel session I participated on yesterday:

Removing the Mumbo-Jumbo from Change Management

A couple of weeks ago Thomas Cagley interviewed me for his SPaMCAST podcast. Oddly enough, a few days later, I had an opportunity to try another experiment using storytelling. That will be a post for another day!

Listen Now!

Topics we discussed:

Storytelling in change management, what is it, and how to use it. Taking the mumbo-jumbo out of change management. No one cares how many models you know, or how many change theories are in your pocket. Buildingcommunities to support change. What is L...

Cause and Purpose, or Urgency for Change?

“What’s theurgency for change?” My experience tells me when people talk about urgency for change, they are asking for afew things…and what they’re asking for is a matter of perspective.

The people who have the agile mindset, want their beliefs reinforced. Their urgency is to convincepeople that agile is better in order to either satisfy their ego, prove they’re right, or to make work better for people. Somepeople are jockeying for position in the hierarchy. Their urgency mightbe wanting to b...

Cause and Purpose or Urgency for Change?

“What’s theurgency for change?” My experience tells me when people talk about urgency for change, they are asking for afew things…and what they’re asking for is a matter of perspective.

The people who have the agile mindset, want their beliefs reinforced. Their urgency is to convincepeople that agile is better in order to either satisfy their ego, prove they’re right, or to make work better for people. Somepeople are jockeying for position in the hierarchy. Their urgency mightbe wanting to b...