Tag: Featured

Agile - Agile Mindset, Kanban, Lean, Organizational Agility, Scaled Agile Framework, Scaling Frameworks, Scrum

Retrospectives @Scale within SAFe® portfolio context

Did you know that the value of facilitating retrospectives is also valuable at scale? In other words, facilitating cross-organizational retrospectives. Improvement is necessary to create better business outcomes. Relentless improvement should be a prime directive in every Lean-Agile organization.

In particular, if you are working within a Lean-Agile SAFe® portfolio you may be familiar with some of the following retrospectives. Others may not be so obvious. The point of which is that we should retro our performance for significant activities/ceremonies. When there are obvious bottlenecks in the system, do a retro, and use wisdom when this is not the case. And remember the easiest way to fail at a retrospective is to neglect to create improvement stories that make their way into the backlog. Continue reading “Retrospectives @Scale within SAFe® portfolio context” →

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Agile - Agile Mindset, Culture, Organization Mindset, Organizational Agility, vlog

AOS Group Coaching – Week 10 – Marshall Guillory

An extended discussion about the importance of specific leadership & executive support (Deming – knowing the way) of organization transformations from the ongoing Agile Online Summit.

 

Agile - Agile Mindset, Culture, Lean, Organization Mindset, Organizational Agility, Scaling Frameworks

Blogagility Learns: Feedback Loop Markers – Org Mindset Enterprise Coach Class Panel

Prosperity has its benefits. I was blessed with the opportunity to visit beautiful Boulder, CO last week to learn about the Org Mindset body of knowledge from my vlog buddy Alex Yakyma. I promised a few folks I would create a vlog review of the course. I will pull that story in my next iteration. First, I have to pass the exam by next Tuesday! Continue reading “Blogagility Learns: Feedback Loop Markers – Org Mindset Enterprise Coach Class Panel” →

Agile - Agile Mindset, Lean, News, Organizational Agility, Scaled Agile Framework, Scaling Frameworks, vlog

vlog #6 – A discussion on Lean Portfolio Management (LPfM) with Alex Yakyma

Big Lake Software sponsored a video log on the topic of Lean Portfolio Management with Alex Yakyma, Founder of Org Mindset, author of “The Rollout”, and Marshall Guillory, Principal Consultant, Enterprise Agility Coach and author at blogagility.com.

This vlog is longer than the normal 2-3 minutes for hard hitting, short timebox coaching videos. The discussion covers quite a bit of ground on five primary topics within LPfM at a fair depth for a little over 32 minutes.

Part 1 Topics:

  1. Define what LPfM is first, in the context of a Lean-Agile transformation or an org mostly demonstrating Lean behavior / Agile behavior 
    1. Is it necessary for every impl. / organization
    2. What size fits? Enterprise? Startups?
  2. Understanding a business’s portfolio(s) relationship between strategy and value streams / mapping
  3. Impediments to implementing LPfM”? 
  4. How to get in front of forecasting with the portfolio coupled with the idea of exploration and validated learning at the highest level in the org.
  5. Options thinking and embracing variability and uncertainty at the portfolio level; exploiting economic opportunities.

Agile - Agile Mindset, Lean, News, Organizational Agility, Scaled Agile Framework, Scaling Frameworks, vlog

2017 Agile Online Summit vlog

This is my (Marshall Guillory) vlog interview and discussion with Tom Henricksen for the 2017 Agile Online Summit – The virtual agile conference. Tom is a very generous gentleman and I sincerely appreciate the opportunity to share my ideas and thoughts with the AOS community. Thank you Tom, we all owe you a debt of gratitude for your efforts!

 

Also, keep an eye out for my vlog with Alex Yakyma, the author of “The Rollout”, all around nice guy, founder of Org Mindset, and thought leader in the Lean-Agile space.

Agile - Agile Mindset, Kanban, Lean, Organizational Agility, Scaled Agile Framework, Training

SAFe® Business Value (BV) reflection

 
I encourage all readers to check out the SAFe® guidance article on the subject before
reading this article. SAFe® and Scaled Agile Framework® are registered trademarks of 
Scaled Agile Inc. Updated: Friday, August 24, 2018

An aside about Business Value reflection

Some SAFe® acronyms defined:
Epic Owner (EO), Business Owner (BO), Product Owner (PO), Product Manager(PM), Lean Portfolio Management (LPfM), Scrum master (SM), Release/Solution Train Engineer (RTE/STE), Solution Management (SMg), Business Value (BV), Story Points (SP)

In a given SAFe® portfolio implementation, a long-lived ART should come to a state where Business Value (BV) is reflective, but not necessarily equal to in any way, of normalized story points (or of the number of normalized items for you #notestimates folks) at the team level. In Tuckman’s stages of group development, this indicates the team of teams is normalized or high performing. In other words, the objective measure is verifiable through attribution to the value delivery and related to a predictable and accurate, but not specific, estimating function/process.

“Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.” – the Agile Manifesto principle #3.

Why is this principle insufficient (in one way)? Working software does not automatically equate to valuable software. As in the expected value (intent) the customer wanted to receive. Since we work with customer proxies in Lean-Agile practices we need to have a way to objectively measure value (even if we work with the actual customer too, but that’s nearly impossible as we’ll explore in another article). The measure must also be validated. We can’t assume that the SAFe method of objective measure with BV is valid as implemented in each unique situation. Continue reading “SAFe® Business Value (BV) reflection” →