Most Popular Articles of 2023
At Practical Agilist…
During 2023, I blogged 22 times and managed to get most of my book The Practical Agilist Guidebook done (coming soon!) I’ve sifted through my posts so you don’t have to and these are perhaps the most interesting highlights. Thanks for reading!
The Mindset Remains
Is agile dead? There’s a lot of noise today. Individual roles, agile frameworks, and certifications will come and go but, to me, one thing that is clear is that the ways of thinking about the new modern ways of working are here to stay. The mindset will remain.
There’s A Critical Lesson Hidden in Well Known Agile History
This post gives a quick spin through Taylorism to the Toyota Production System and all the innovation that started the agile movement well before the Agile Manifesto, including the birth of Kanban, Kaizen, Gemba, Lean, Value Stream Management, Information Radiators, and most importantly putting humans, culture, and trust at the center of our processes.
3 Killer Tips for Scrum Masters
All too many Scrum Masters are focused on the things they need to learn like it’s academic and perhaps avoid some of the behaviors that make them great at what they do. Consider these tips to hone your craft: be direct with team members and others to improve communications; get uncomfortable with your own growth, weaknesses, and your own curiosity; and be accountable to what you say you’ll do, following a process of your own, and managing your own WIP!
The Role of Epics in Being Agile
The concept of an epic is used in different ways depending on the scale at which you’ve deployed agile in your organization. Understanding the differences, and re-visiting why we use them in the first place can be a very helpful refresher for teams. Epics can re-orient us to being outcome oriented. They can also help drive strategy and even how we fund initiatives and drive the intake and distribution of large bodies of work across teams.
Get Comfortable Being Uncomfortable
As coaches and scrum masters we often say this frequently to others. But are you actually paying attention to whether you’re improving yourself right now? Are you doing anything uncomfortable that leads to growth or are you just treading well worth paths that are easier? To avoid languishing, you may need to self-reflect and assess what you’re actually spending your time on, maybe change up a few things, or set some meaningful goals.
Can you tell who will make a great Scrum Master?
Are you a connector of dots? What kind of person, what qualities, does it take to be good at the different agile roles? Have you started to pay attention to where your role requires a level of systems thinking? In this post are my two favorite quotes from Steve Jobs that reinforce this point about having great breadth and depth of experiences to be better at helping others. If you don’t have that je ne sais quoi, maybe you too should move to Paris for a while and be a poet for a few years!
Why are we even trying to be agile?
Has anyone in your organization ever answered this succinctly? Is there a reason your company is trying to transform the way it works and thinks? If not, I suggest that maybe you take a stab at it and hand it to them on a silver platter so that it might be shared with others. In the process, you might help your leadership understand the core tenets of the Agile Mindset.
From Scrum Master to Agile Coach
A lot of what I describe in this post may be helpful to those learning to become a Scrum Master for the first time as well. My advice is centered on describing what I think it takes to become an Agile Coach, which is not a straight line and is unique for every individual. The core lesson is to lean into your strengths and experiences. But I also highlight some extremely common, and what I think are quite necessary, knowledge and reading that will be expected of you to know as you step into the role.
If you enjoyed this, please clap and share. It means a lot to know my work on this blog is read and used by agilists out there in the world.
Hi, I’m Brian Link, an Enterprise Agile Coach who loves his job helping people. I call myself and my company the “Practical Agilist” because I pride myself on helping others distill down the practices and frameworks of the agile universe into easy to understand and simple common sense. I offer fractional agile coaching services to help teams improve affordably. See more at FractionalAgileCoach.com
How well is your team “being agile”? Our self-assessment tool focuses on 24 topics of modern ways of working including the Agile Manifesto and Modern Agile basics, XP, Design Thinking, Lean, DevOps, and Systems Thinking. It comes with deep links into the Practical Agilist Guidebook to aid continuous improvement in teams of any kind. Learn more at MakeTeamsAwesome.com
The Practical Agilist Guidebook is a reference guide that gives easy to understand advice as if you had an agile coach showing you why the topic is important, what you can start doing about it, scrum master tips, AI prompts to dig deeper, and tons of third party references describing similar perspectives. Learn more at PracticalAgilistGuidebook.com
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