Since the outbreak of COVID-19, remote working is becoming more and more the norm. While employees are starting to settle into remote working, leaders find themselves challenged in ensuring their employees are engaged and productive.
With the huge change organisations are experiencing moving to remote ways of working, one of the key challenges facing many executives is how to ensure minimal disruption to productivity and delivery at a time when they need to pivot and adapt to changing prioritises.
There’s a temptation in times of crisis for leadership to feel the need to redeploy people. The idea is that urgent priorities are best handled by moving people around, creating tiger teams, and putting them on the urgent work. Are long lived agile teams a luxury we can no longer afford?
Now more than ever, the ability to respond to change over ‘following a plan’ couldn’t ring truer. Now we are working from home, readjusting to a new ‘norm’, but all the while living in a state of chaos whilst still ‘keeping the lights on’ in the space of not months or years but in weeks, days and even hours. How do executives ensure their agile teams remain productive when working remotely?
How can you rapidly scale the ability to pivot to disruptive change? Agile transformations can take 3-5 years. While the bigger the system of work the longer it takes, there are some key activities you can do to lead the change, make it more effective, and make it stick.
The concern is that with remote working, we lose visibility and transparency and may not identify a problem till later down the track when a release or delivery is at risk. We analysed teams and provided executives with transparency of which teams we needed to target for coaching support and guidance to uplift the team’s ability to work remotely, remain cohesive as a team and deliver successfully.
In the face of disruptive change, the ability for executives to mobilise action is paramount. While self-organisation is a key enabler, how do you support and encourage teams to organise themselves without micromanaging them solving every impediment for them?
How quickly are you able to respond to disruptive change? Decentralisation is a key enabler to optimise the flow of value, react to changing markets, and ensure your policies are responsive to changing contexts. But not everything needs to be decentralised.
What does it take to coach a Release Train Engineer (RTE) and Chief Scrum Master? A learning canvas can help create the focus needed to rapidly improve agile capability of this key role.
As more and more staff are adjusting towards working remotely, Executives and their programs and teams will need additional support to enable them to maintain productivity, to stay connected and engaged to deliver critical outcomes. Here’s how to address these challenges.
How do you get the most from your agile coaching investment? As more and more organisations build agility into their operating models, they’re realising the benefits of expert agile coaching to help drive and support agile adoption and improvement. Creating and supporting alignment across agile coaches is key to reap the rewards that agile ways of working can bring.
As Scrum masters we are used to dealing with an ever changing, complex environment and that is the sweet spot for being agile and where having an agile mindset is crucial. It’s now more critical than ever, for Scrum Masters to ensure agile practice is maintained and to support teams to continuously improve their practice and self organise but stay connected and focused on the Sprint Goal.
As with face-2-face meetings, online meetings also have an etiquette (“Netiquette”) to make them effective. One of the 12 principles of the agile manifesto suggests face-to-face is the best option but in today’s world of social distancing and WFH, it is no longer an option.
Here are the guidelines we have found useful for having for online meetings with distributed
The Scrum Master doesn’t remove impediments from the team. Their job encompasses 22 wider stances for supporting the team to self-organise to remove impediments themselves, coaching the Product Owner and coaching the wider organisation.
Many organisations are making guidance on what tools to use for remote teams in response to COVID-19. The situation isn’t a tools problem. This is a people problem – how can people, who are social creatures, successfully work remotely without physical interaction?
What does an agile operating model look like? How do you manage capabilities while still aligning to the delivery needs of the organisation. How do you balance stakeholder and customer needs? It’s a tricky balancing act, but here are some options to consider.
Design Thinking is an excellent tool for considering where to invest in user research activities, but in the context of complex product development, it might not be enough.
A shared services team improved their time-to-market by 67% using EBM, and Kanban with Scrum.
Better executive decision making comes from transparency and effective metrics. In agile, what does this look like?
Start your agile journey right with Mia Horrigan’s (PST) recommendations on great material for people new to Scrum and, more broadly, agile.
How to look beyond the post-it notes and measure the impact of your Agile Coaches
How to use OKRs within the scaled agile framework and make it work? Use Evidence Based Management (EBM).
There are a lot of misconceptions about what an Agile Coach is or isn’t at the moment. Are they the Scrum Master of a team? Does their role include coaching the team or is is something more?
To truly drive cultural and behavioural change takes time. It also takes experience. He’s what effective agile coaches do every Sprint. The list might surprise you.
Align the work of your whole enterprise to realising value with Evidence Based Management.
What does a PMO look like in a scaled agile, product focussed environment? ZXM helped W.A. Police with this tricky part of their agile transformation.
One of the biggest advantages stemming from good scaled-agile practice is the benefit of enhanced transparency. This helps to manage and reduce risk.
Matthew Hodgson, CEO of Zen Ex Machina, presented at Gartner Symposium ITXpo on his 5 insights into getting twice as much in half the time in a way that addresses leadership, cultural change and operating models.
To achieve positive changes in behaviour feedback needs to come from a foundation of trust, delivered at the right time, in a private space.
Earlier this month, I was asked to present for R U OK day at one of our clients sites.
Getting started with agile can be daunting. So what are the real questions you should be asking? It all starts with teams and understanding that agile is not just for software or the people that report to you.
Well, at first sight Zombie Scrum seems to be normal Scrum. But it lacks a beating heart.
Can you predict the future? Can it really be planned in the 21st century? In the face of relentless technological change, disruptive forces in industry after industry, global competition, and so on, strategic planning often seems like pointless wishful thinking.
In this talk, ZXM CEO Matthew Hodgson, presents to the Global Scrum Gathering in Austin on patterns from Gottman and
Zen Ex Machina is a leading Agile transformation company. Following our success in CV’s Corporate Excellence Awards, Zen Ex Machina
What does it take to be an agile leader? 21st century leaders face a raft of challenges: technological change, disruptive forces in industry after industry, and global competition. What does leadership look like in a VUCA, highly disruptive world?
Copyright © Zen Ex Machina® and ™ (2021). All rights reserved. ABN 93 153 194 220
Copyright © Zen Ex Machina® and ™ (2021). All rights reserved. ABN 93 153 194 220
