Wouldn’t it be great if there was guidance on how to know if your Agile transformation is doomed to failure? Perhaps a short set of leading indicators or “red alerts” that give us an early warning signal? If we have this, we could react and potentially turn the ship around…

As Agilists, we preach “We want empowered teams!” But we turn right around and tell the teams to use the Scrum (or Kanban) framework. Why? Because we require corporate-wide Agile approach consistency, and we want to make it easier for when people transfer into a new team. Stop for a…

Ever wonder what the “Young Frankenstein” movie has in common with Agile transformations? Me neither. Until now. While channel surfing recently, I ran into the great Mel Brook’s classic movie. It still holds up today. In summary, some Agile transformations have an “abby normal” brain. …

As an Agile coaching community, we have gone astray. We have become obsessed with installing frameworks. We lead with frameworks instead of empathy. I’m not preaching, I’m guilty as charged. Now is the time for a great reset within the Agile coaching community. We need to stop leading with framework…

We’ve all been there before, right? On one hand, we live in a classic siloed organization that is slow to respond to the market. Cross-org dependencies are the norm. The flow of value to the customer is slow. Painfully slow. Value stream identification is non-existent. On the other hand, we…

Imagine. Let’s start rethinking Agile transformations. What if Leaders would issue an “Agile statement of intent” instead of attempting another costly framework-driven transformation? How would our life at work be different? Can you imagine the agility innovation that this would spark? For example, what if a Leader made the following…

Let’s briefly explore my list of 6 devastating SAFe anti-patterns. Each of these can be considered “devastating” due to the tremendous amounts of waste involved. #1 — Installing SAFe As-Is SAFe is huge. It is designed to cover most transformation needs from a perspective of scaling Agile at all levels…

Leaders and Executives considering a “scaled Agile transformation” — you have a choice. You can fall in line with the masses and install a scaling framework such as SAFe. Alternatively, you can take a much more targeted approach, one that addresses your needs specifically, and that actually simplifies (de-scales) product…

True story — I once did some consulting at a Fortune 50 company where the SAFe transformation success was measured by “number of ARTs launched”. You can guess what happened… Fake Agile Release Trains (FARTs). Entire VP and Director organizations were now calling themselves an “Agile Release Train” and going…