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User Story Mapping 2.0
Listen to the podcast version: A Story Mapping Workshop is a collaborative session where teams focus on understanding the end-to-end user journey and break it down into valuable, outcome-driven user stories. The goal is to visualize how users interact with the product...
How to measure success of an Agile Transformation?
Agile metrics were always a hot topic, and as more and more organizations are making a move toward business agility, investing millions of dollars into transforming their business, more leaders wonder how the success of such transformations could be measured. Below is...
Business Outcomes over Time-to-Market
Corporate leaders often associate lean-agile transformation with achieving faster delivery at lower costs. While it's natural to prioritize the impact on the bottom line, this approach is akin to having tunnel vision that prevents us from seeing greater opportunities....
Modern Leadership: 6 Tips to Empower Teams through Effective Delegation
As leaders, we often wear many hats, but one of the most crucial skills we must cultivate is the art of delegation. In my coaching practice, I often find seasoned managers who end up taking on too many tasks themselves and feeling stressed about completing all the...
Tips to bring energy back into daily standups
Daily Stand-up is a short meeting for a team to sync on their progress towards a common goal and collectively build a plan for the day. However, despite the concept seeming simple, in my practice, I find this regular team routine to be the most misunderstood or, even...
Nurturing Effective Leadership: Bridging the Gap Between Individual Contributors and Leaders
As companies embrace a lean-agile mindset, the demand for effective leadership has never been greater. However, in my practice, I frequently encounter examples of one of the Leadership Dilemmas where in an attempt to satisfy such demand, organizations often recognize...
The Pocket Guide to Software Testing: Unveiling the Importance of Testing Types
In the ever-evolving world of software development, Agile methodologies have become the driving force behind efficient and iterative software delivery approaches. However, while Agile training primarily focuses on mindset and principles, new Agilists often lack a...
How to Design Effective Agile Teams
In one of my previous articles I had already mentioned the importance for the managers and leaders to be able to delegate work and trust their teams to find the best ways of getting it done. In my practice I often encounter an issue where a talented, responsible...
SAFe 6.0 Release – Updated Scaled Framework
SAFe 6.0 introduced a number of much-needed updates to the framework. Some say SAFe finally graduated from a high school. Indeed, now it focuses on the flow, expands Business Agility practices, embeds Kanban better (finally acknowledging its place next to scrum),...
Top Agile Metrics to Measure Delivery Performance
Are you looking for ways to measure the performance of your Agile teams and understand their delivery performance? While there are many metrics to choose from, not all of them are created equal. Additionally, the information provided online is often misleading or...
Which is Better: Work From Home or From an Office?
Working from home has become a new normal for many people around the world, especially since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as the deadly disease doesn’t pose much threat any longer, many executives take an attempt to return employees to the...
14 Things to Expect, and Not to Expect from a Scrum Master
The role of a "Scrum Master" was first mentioned in the mid-1990s, when the Agile framework known as Scrum was introduced by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland as an agile framework designed to manage complex projects and improve product development...
What is a Servant Leader and How Can You Become One?
As we now know, the management style that many of us refer to as “traditional” was never something that subordinates have particularly enjoyed. And in 1970 when Robert K. Greenleaf published his famous essay, “The Servant as Leader”, it was a rather radical protest...
Benefits of Cross-Functional Teams
Cross-functional teams are composed of individuals with different skills and expertise, allowing for a more diverse range of perspectives and approaches to problem-solving. This diversity of perspectives can help the team to come up with innovative solutions and avoid...
The “Executive Product Owners”
As unfortunate as it gets, despite all the years of practicing scrum, number of training sessions and variety of coaches leading product ownership workshops, some of the organizations seem to not be able to easily embrace this seemingly simple concept. The “Product...
Project vs. Product Delivery
Many of the problems that companies experience along the way of enhancing the capabilities of their products come from an unbendable reluctance to view them as products. A project management doctrine has engraved itself deeply into the core organizational practices....
Effective (or not) ways for organizing JIRA boards for your teams. Part I
One of the big questions you may have as you're organizing a new scrum team is, "How do we use JIRA?" and in particular, "how do we organize the JIRA board?". Well, let me use the standard answer a consultant would chime in with here: it depends. Unfortunately,...
Work from home and how we nailed it!
With the majority of organizations being urged to shift their operations to work from home (WFH) mode, I have noticed an ever-increasing number of articles and posts that highlight the difficulties teams and managers experience when transitioning to the new modus...
90+ reasons to challenge your Scrum adoption
Scrum, but… The term “Scrumbut” is now often used to refer to incorrect understanding or intended modification of Scrum rules. Scrumbuts are reasons why teams can't take full advantage of Scrum to realize the full benefits of agile product development, along with the...