Lean Startup for Agile Transition – Don’t Forget Your Customers
Jeff Anderson has a great blog post about using Lean Startup to rollout a large Lean/Kanban transition. We’re using this on a medium-large Lean/Kanban transition and I’m finding it to help a great deal with focus. Usually I like to have a ‘transition backlog‘ of items to introduce and then after they get introduced see what changes stick and what don’t. The difference with using a Lean Startup approach is to identify assumptions with a measurement before...
Read MoreAgile….at Starbucks?
I’m sitting here at Starbucks waiting for the garage across the parking lot to finish off some maintenance on my car. There’s a large queue forming at the counter, clearly the bottleneck is the ordering system. So how does this Starbucks handle it? The person who prepares the coffee takes and starts the order and for the second person in line to increase throughput. By the time that person pays the cashier, their order is ready and out they go. Quick and efficient. Seems like...
Read MoreWhat Your Organization Can Learn from Strawberry Shortcake
My 3 year old loves Strawberry Shortcake. Thanks to new fangled computer graphics, Strawberry is back and better than every! This particular episode was an eye-opener of process evolution and learnings that had an eerie parallel to how organizations move through change models and transform to Agile. One of the characters in Berry Land (Orange) discovered a new game called Dandy-Ball. They had a ball stuffed with Dandelion seeds that they started hitting around. Everybody loved it. They...
Read MoreDo You Need a Scrum Master or a Coach?
I was talking with a former collegue the other day about his desire to bring in a Scrum Master to help with their move to Agile. They had a pilot team running using a home-grown implementation and he felt it was time to bring in some outside help. As I collected more data, it became clear he was looking at a larger transformation effort. This particular organization was large and complex (~300 people in the IT department alone) and the nature of their industry breeds more conservative and...
Read MoreGet Lean Change
