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Effective Agility Requires Cultural Changes: Part 1

Johanna Rothman

I see many teams and team members who say, “Agile stinks. ” When I ask people what's happening, they say: We're doing an agile death march because someone else already told us what we have to do and the date it's due. And don't get me started on how coaches tend to do life coaching instead of support for agility.)

Agile 88
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Tired of Fake Agility? Choose When to Experiment and When to Deliver

Johanna Rothman

I have a new book: Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility. I wrote it because I'm concerned about what I see in too many supposedly agile teams: Crazy-long backlogs and roadmaps. Worse, sometimes the team doesn't demo or deliver. The post Tired of Fake Agility?

Agile 84
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Agile Approaches Offer Strategic Advantage; Agile Tools are Tactics, Part 2

Johanna Rothman

So when does it make sense to customize your agile approach to gain a strategic advantage? They want an agile approach, so they started with Scrum. The first was not waiting for the end of an iteration to demo or release. They demo'd every week on Wednesday mornings and then they released after the demo. We do what works.”

Agile 105
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Unemployed Agilists: How to Increase Your Value to Get a Great Job, Part 3

Johanna Rothman

That part discusses why managers see agile coaches and Scrum Masters as staff positions, not line jobs. This post is about your deep domain expertise, first in product, then in agility. Assess Your Product Subject Matter Domain Expertise There are at least two kinds of domain expertise: the product itself, and agile/lean expertise.

Agile 81
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How to Change a Workshop In-Person Game to a Remote Simulation for Effective Results

Johanna Rothman

If you took an agile workshop sometime in the past 15 years, you probably played the “ ball game.” Especially since they've probably suffered through way too many “agile” workshops with more and more games. Show a demo of whatever you complete at the 15-minute mark. Why do I have to play a game?”

Agile 75
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What Lifecycle or Agile Approach Fits Your Context? Part 3, Incremental Lifecycles

Johanna Rothman

Opportunities for More Agility. Because we release every time we finish a feature set, we have these opportunities for agility: Re-rank the remaining feature sets. See and demo the product as it grows. If your company can't create an agile culture, consider an incremental lifecycle, especially if you have schedule risks.

Agile 112
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Capitalizing Software During an Agile Transformation

Johanna Rothman

They've started to use agile approaches. Capitalization for Agile Work. Let me walk you through an example of a 5-person agile team. So, let's assume the team spends a total of 4 hours planning, retrospecting, demoing, all that non-creation time out of the 40 hours the team works. (I Why Capitalize?