OMS Consulting Partners, LLC

Thanks to Nikola Cvetanovski for another reminder that being 'too busy' has become, in many places, a status symbol. When I train introductory Agile, I also share the slide shown below, and try to help people consider that it just might be better to make the hard choice of what is MOST important, focus on that, and do it right instead of trying to "serve too many masters"? What are your thoughts?

With apologies to William Shakespeare, here is a great short video from Geoff Watts on when Agile is a good approach, and when a traditional approach makes more sense. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ic1ZNx65rU&feature=youtu.be

Another guest contribution from Dan Greenberg... Should we be using Fibonacci, #noestimates, t-shirt sizing, or some other method for estimating work? How should we handle unplanned work? Who is responsible for testing? Should we point bugs? ________ is in getting in my way – remove the impediment, Scrum Master. Whose job is it to enforce that a team finish what they commit to? What does “Agile” say to do? Sound like a typical morning? These questions are probably familiar if you are serving in a Scrum Master or Agile Coach type role. Because our primary responsibility is to champion continuous improvement, we naturally find ourselves in situations that feel chaotic and out of control. I say – embrace the chaos. It’s a good thing. The fact that your team is thinking about these types of issues means they care and they are not complacent. The next step is to get them to own it. My role is to remind the team that Agile has no answers for any of the above quest...

"Culture eats strategy" "Once culture changes in the company everything happens fast." - Indra Nooyi - Pepsico CEO At the heart of any good Agile Transformation is cultural transformation. Or as Ken Schwaber said...

Weak leaders lock people into job descriptions. Strong leaders unlock people's full potential. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/weak-leaders-lock-people-job-descriptions-strong-full-vishnepolsky/ Excerpt: I was not qualified for my fist management job. I acted as such, and my team was not happy. I was too cautious to avoid mistakes and screw ups, and held my team back. My new boss called me into his office, and asked to close the door. He said - Oleg, I want you to make 5 significant mistakes a week. I was shocked. My boss was brilliant. He knew I needed to be liberated. Empowered, I went back and my team and I were set on fire. We launched first in the industry financial web site. We migrated clients to a new system. We moved data centers.

Wow... https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agile-coaching-hurting-dahm-m-hongchai

One of the 12 Agile principles relates to the importance of face to face communication. Here's a great article from the Agile Times referring to "Osmotic Communication" which is one of the advantages of being colocated. https://theagiletimes.com/osmotic-communication-uses-subconscious/ "...The principle behind osmotic transmission and absorption of team members’ conversations implies that we acquire knowledge even if we are not an active participant in any particular conversation . Much like a song playing in the background, even if you don’t know the name of the song, if heard regularly over time, you may just be able to know the melody or lyrics without even trying to memorize them. How this actually is made possible is explained through the way our minds work on a subconscious level ..."