Agile maturity assessments: Going back to Shu Ha Ri.
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Benefits of an agile product management operating model.
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The smart way to be agile.
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$2M savings per program
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50% faster delivery
We’ve turned 6-month delivery cycles into as little as 3-weeks through mapping the value stream and highlighting the cost of delay of upfront scoping and budget activities.
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New at ZXM Blog
A collection of stories, the latest insights, and experiences from our agile consultants.
The Agile Mindset. After 10 years of research on teams what is it?
Learn about the only agile assessment and coaching tool based on data analytics that can predict how agile you really are.
Government Agility: Framework? Methodology? What should it really look like?
Government work is complex. This framework and white paper addresses the core issues facing government and the need for a specific view of agility to improve ability to pivot, time to deliver on minister’s announcements, and reduced costs of delivering government programs.
How Do You Know if You’re Really Agile?
Learn about the only agile assessment and coaching tool based on data analytics that can predict how agile you really are.
Definition of a Defect in Agile and the Definition of Done
A stakeholder suddenly claims it doesn’t work as intended and therefore it’s a bug that requires immediate attention. What do you do? How do you treat bugs and incidents and change requests in agile teams?
Change Management is Not a Downstream Activity
To set up your organisation to succeed, Change should not be an after thought or purely a downstream actvity. It’s not a supporting service, it belongs in your agile teams.
Stop escalating impediments. Support the team to solve them.
Got blockers? Don’t leave them til the Standup and don’t remove them yourself. Help the team to self-organise!
Groupthink: the bane of high performing Agile Teams
What makes an agile team great and why? After coaching a number of teams in Scrum, we’ve now seen a number that, after a some months now, could be considered high performers. Some of these go bad and reject any external criticism regardless of how accurate that might be. Why do these teams go bad? Groupthink might have the answer.
Scrum has changed! What’s out? What’s new?
The last Scrum Guide was published in 2017. In 2020, what does the Scrum Guide now reinforce as “best practice” for its framework? Scrum in non-software environments – including medicine, HR, and finance, as well as in service delivery – is now its focus.
Scrum Changes: Self-Organisation vs Self-Management
The new version of Scrum (2020) says teams should be self-managing. What does this mean and what are the impacts for managers?
Scrum’s Roles Have Changed. Updates to the Scrum Guide 2020.
You’ve got your job title, but what do the new roles in Scrum mean for you and the work your team does?
Top tips for putting the spark back in your team
All teams go through it. It’s the natural stage where the spark of fun has given way to the daily trudge of delivery of work. Here’s how to bring the zing back.
Agile and User Engagement: When is the right time to go to users?
There are many traditional times you can engage users – gathering requirements and user acceptance testing. What are the best times to engage users when you’re in an agile team?
What’s the difference between a Project Manager and a Scrum Master
Is a Scrum Master a team lead, agile project manager, or delivery manager? There are many differences between the role of project manager and Scrum Master. Who writes reports, approves work, and controls and manages outcomes for an agile team might surprise you.
What to do when a User Story is 'not done'
Teams love to get credit for their efforts, but is that what you should do if a User Story gets 1/2 way there but doesn’t get to Done in the Sprint? What should you really do with the remainder of the work?
Agile for All: How Does Agile IQ Benefit Everyone In Your Enterprise
Every executive knows that access to credible, reliable and independent data is the key to making sound decisions. Yet, while many organisations turn to intuition, gut instinct, self-reporting, and vanity metrics when it comes to agile capability maturity, now there’s a way to have an objective picture.
Training in a Virtual World – How to get that F2F vibe in a remote classroom
It would be great if training in the virtual world were as simple as training in person, but it’s not. As workplaces transitioned to working remotely, we had to rapidly pivot and work out how to deliver virtual training but also keep the vibe of interaction and discussion that makes face to face (F2F) sessions so valuable.
Executive agility: To be able to pivot and respond effectively in times of change
How do executives ensure their agile teams remain productive and how do you create a culture that can pivot and adapt to meet market changes? How to create the measures to help you steer when the speed of change is rapid and understand the leading indicators to track to reduce your risk profile.
How do I run a Retrospective?
The Retrospective is one of five events in Scrum. It’s purpose is to inspect the whole Scrum Team from the perspective of people, process and tools, and then adapt the way the whole team works (including the Product Owner).
Waterfall vs. Agile – Why do projects fail? Is it a knowledge problem or a requirements problem
Why do traditional, waterfall style projects fail? Some claim its a requirements problem and point to the need for more planning, user research, and design. The truth is we’re not looking at the problem the right way and complex environments require a different way to collecting information and delivering using that knowledge.
Increase your Ability to Pivot with Agile Change Management Practices
Traditional Change Management’s linear approach exacerbates the steepness of the change curve and leads to a “Productivity Dip” as it attempts to manage risk through upfront planning. Agile Change Management addresses this dip by iterative customer feedback to focus efforts on the most important activities, determined by customer value and stakeholder impact and outcomes
The symbols of agile are nice, but they won’t make you agile or change your culture.
What is an agile culture? How do you recognise an agile enterprise – one that’s gone through a true digital transformation? Some would point to post-it notes, others would highlight the dedicated team spaces decorated in their team symbols. Others would point to the posters around the office, heralding innovation. Unfortunately, these won’t make you agile.
What Knowledge and Experience do you need to be an Agile Coach?
To be effective, agile coaches require deep, applied expertise and experience across multiple organisations, multiple projects and industries. As the organsiation scales, the Agile Coaching Development Pathway shows the focus of the role as it scales to more responsibilities beyond being a coach of a single team and provides guidance on what knowledge and experience is required to be an Enterprise Coach.
Better together: Agile + Lean UX
How do you make Design Thinking, Lean UX, and Agile work together. Sprint 0? Design Sprints? Upfront design and planning tends to delay the delivery of value, so there must be a better way to use Scrum but also engage in discovery work at the same time without devolving into parallel design work. Integrating design, user research, and experimentation into Sprints is the key.
The three steps to setting Up an Agile Academy to Build Internal Agile Coaching Capability
Sharing patterns and practices and driving consistency across the organisation is key to building an organsiationational capability however eventually when we as external consultanst leave, there is always the risk that the organisation will just spring back to their old ways of working. So we set up ZXM Agile Academy to build enduring internal capability.
How do I run a Sprint Review?
The Sprint Review is one of five events in Scrum. It’s purpose is to inspect the Increment of work, get feedback, and then adapt the Product Backlog. And while many people refer to the Sprint Review as the “demo” or “showcase”, this is only one aspect of the Sprint Review.
Improving Program Agility using Evidence Based Measures of Agility in OKRs
OKRs have been an established way to set objectives however the associated activities tend to focus on outputs and not outcomes and impacts. To measure Program Agility, we used Evidence Based Management (EBM) as a framework for OKRs to help shift metrics towards value of the investment to help them make strategic investment decision based on evidence to improve business outcomes.
How do I run a Daily Scrum?
Many people use the Daily Scrum to provide a status report to the Product Owner or Scrum Master, and even to stakeholders, but this event plays a more critical part in ensuring that the team continues to stay focussed on their goal and adapt their work so they improve their chance of achieving it.
Issues with Integration as you Scale? – Agile Principles and Practices to Mitigate
How to mitigate Integration issues? – In the short term, transparency and communication is key. In the longer-term, we needed a more empowering state so we looked at how to to use agile practices to build capability and evolving environment practices to move to automation and continous integration.
Measuring agile culture with Agile IQ
Agile IQ® is an effective way to measure agile culture. Overall, it’s an effective leading indicator of the changes to mindset, behaviour and culture that’s needed to ensure that your investment in your agile enterprise is on track to deliver the results you need.
How do I run Sprint Planning?
Sprint Planning is one of Scrum’s five events. There’s more to it than just making a plan. Importantly, as an action of empiricism, the team should be inspecting the Product Backlog and adapting, and creating, a Sprint Backlog that makes their plan to achieve the Sprint Goal, and deliver a potentially releasable Increment, transparent.
Setting up a New Agile Team
When setting up new agile teams we have found that starting small with the basics and adding patterns as they start to develop capability has helped us get new teams up and running within 2-3 days and acheive a baseline of agile capability within 3 months
Measuring agility with Agile IQ
Agile delivers significant benefits over traditional ways of working, but how do you know when you’re agile? How do you use a metrics-driven approach to create repeatability, consistency, and scalability of agile capability across the enterprise? Agile IQ is the key.
Should you rotate the RTE role every Program Increment (PI)?
Whilst the RTE role is a challenging role, there is limited benefit in rotating the role each PI. Instead, ensure the focus is on the right things to promote incremental delivery and continuous improvements
Integrating Agile with Change Management Principles to develop a Framework
Agile change management embraces as a set of principles that can help focus efforts on the most important activities, determined by customer value and stakeholder impact and outcomes
Product Management versus Project Management
Gartner reports that 85% of executives are now turning to agile product management over projects. Why is this shift occurring and what do you need to know about product management to optimise your strategic investments for greater market share, better ability to pivot, or get your products to market faster?
Approach for Maturing an Agile Centre of Excellence
Establishing an Agile Centre of Excellence (CoE) to lead and drive agile transformations and building an internal capability to ensure ongoing support on the organisation’s journey is critical.
Building An Internal Agile Capability and Knowledge
Agile coaching focused on developing and building agile capability and maturity and transferring knowledge to develop people in key agile roles to build an enduring internal agile capability after our engagement as external consultants concluded completed.
Big Upfront Planning is Out. Pivoting to Respond to Change is In
With uncertainty at an all time high, the response of many organisations in those early days was to batten down the hatches and the impact may be felt for many months to come. To survive through this, big up front planning will be out and pivoting to respond to change will be the new normal.
Remote PI Planning – Insights into what worked and what didn’t
Running remote PI planning for the first time 100% virtual was a bit daunting a few weeks ago when the reality set in that with the current crisis, this was now our reality. We prepared, thought through worse case scenarios and had back up plans and felt eerily calm as the day began. It was a great success and here are our tips.
Want to be an Agile Coach? Being a Lean Agile Leader and Practitioner is key!
If your an agile coach, just knowing Agile, or Scrum, or how to set up a Kanban board won’t be enough to get you though the complexities involved in successfully performing the role and being an agile leader. Seek to expand your knowledge and capabilities and practice intentionally as part of your own continuous improvement.
Strategies for successfully leading remote agile teams
Leading remote agile teams was always going to be tricky. Implementing these 6 strategies can help leaders reduce team stress, address concerns about work progress, increase productivity for the teams, and restore and maintain healthy communication channels.
Principles of Effective Governance
What governance best supports product development efforts using agile frameworks? Don’t be tempted to over complicated things with a hybrid committee structure. Scrum has all the roles and responsibilities you need to deliver value.
Multitasking is ruining your productivity when you’re working remotely
De-stressing when you’re working from home with a brisk walk around the block is essential for productivity. There is, unfortunately, all the unwanted breaks. Notifications on your phone. Email alerts that have popped up. A tick-tock video that needs watching. Unfortunately, switching tasks for just a few seconds is ruining your productivity.
Agile is a mindset. Agile is behaviour.
Agile is a mindset. You hear it all the time. But what does an agile mindset mean? What actions and behaviours should you see from an enterprise that has an agile mindset?
Why people hate Scrum’s daily stand-ups and what to do about it
What is a “daily stand-up” really for and how do you get the best out of this key Scrum event? How do you avoid stand-up fatigue? Here are some tips to make the Daily Scrum effective again.
How leadership can promote a remote agile team culture
Scrum teams excel in rapidly changing complex environments and their ability to adapt and pivot to fast changing business priorities can be a huge advantage. However, the current abrupt shift from co-located to remote working would challenge even the most high performing agile team.
Rapid pivoting and responsiveness will be the “new normal”
Rapidly pivoting to new priorities and understanding what can be done now to solve immediate impediments to work are the new normal for executives. Their need to be more responsive has led to rapid acceleration of digital transformation plans and business agility.
Scaling agile from 5 teams to 27 teams within 12 months
Scaling is challenging and one of the key reasons agile initiatives fail is that the culture of the organisation is at odds with agile mindset and agile principles. But the next key factor is management support. So we knew that this change needed to be driven and supported by the leadership team in order to be successful.
How do you go from siloed reporting to organisational-wide transparency of value and priorities?
Every executive is familiar with the hours long weekly meetings where senior leaders report to the CIO. When the world is rapidly changing and whole divisions work remotely, comprehensive formal reports are good but outdated by the time they’re written.
Communication strategies for remote agile teams
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.
How to rapidly divert and re-deploy teams to changing priorities without losing momentum
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.
Long lived agile teams – are they still practical in a COVID world?
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?
Executive agility to be able to respond effectively in chaos
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 to rapidly scale enterprise agility – key activities for Executives
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.
Assessing capability of agile teams to either strive or stumble as remote virtual teams
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.
Self-organisation. 5 things you should be doing to support agile teams.
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?
Decentralising decision-making. Making rapid decisions where it counts.
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.
Using a Coaching Canvas to develop the Release Train Engineer Capability
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.
Top Five Concerns for Executives as Teams become a Remote Workforce
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.
Working together with multiple agile coaches
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.
Scrum Master Tips for Running Scrum Events Remotely
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.
“Netiquette” for online meetings for remote and distributed teams
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
22 Stances of a Scrum Master
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.
Does agility go out the window when we work remotely?
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?
Agile and Project Operating Models
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.
An Executive’s guide to design investments: Design Thinking and Cynefin
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.
Reducing batch size as leading indicator of time to market
A shared services team improved their time-to-market by 67% using EBM, and Kanban with Scrum.
Executive tips for better decision making
Better executive decision making comes from transparency and effective metrics. In agile, what does this look like?
Scrum Master resources for when you are starting your journey
Start your agile journey right with Mia Horrigan’s (PST) recommendations on great material for people new to Scrum and, more broadly, agile.
What Makes a Good Agile Coach? Building your Agile Capability: Part I
How to look beyond the post-it notes and measure the impact of your Agile Coaches
Agile Metrics: Stop using activities as outcomes in OKRs. Use impacts and outcomes.
How to use OKRs within the scaled agile framework and make it work? Use Evidence Based Management (EBM).
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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