Much of the Agile and Scrum Training offered in today’s market is focused on a role or an accountability.  There are classes for Product Owners, Developers and Scrum Masters. People have even created training for leaders and managers working in an Agile environment.    One role that’s been underserved in the Agile training space is...Read More

Many organizations move toward a more agile way of working without fully understanding the benefits that they are trying to capture. While coaches and consultants, yours truly included, emphasize that they should start with their “Why?” (shout-out to Simon Sinek), the “Why?” will only get you so far. Stating that we want to “Decrease time...Read More

I’m excited that agilityIRL has begun a new partnership with the Minnesota chapter of the Project Management Institute (PMI). It has obvious benefits for agilityIRL, as we will be bringing our training services to a new market. However, it’s more than that. For me it represents tying together two phases of my career and shows...Read More

“Technical Debt” has been a topic of discussion within the software industry for several years.  However, recent events such as the Southwest airlines debacle and the FAA outage has brought “Technical Debt” and its consequences into the main stream, even garnering mention on the front page of the New York Times.   “Technical Debt”, as...Read More

Appreciation When Work Is Done Well People want to feel appreciated when they do their work well. This is about so much more than money. In fact, unless you are working with mercenaries whose primary motivation is money (e.g., many sales people, just-passing-through CEO’s, etc.), money is not a motivator by its presence, but it...Read More

One way to judge someone’s leadership maturity is based on the maturity they show in taking responsibility and the maturity they show in engaging others, be they subordinates, superiors, peers, customers, vendors or others.  Adapting a Control/Responsibility Matrix presented by Seth Godin[1], we’ll present our “Leadership Maturity Matrix,” identifying four different leadership personas, representing different...Read More

Based on over 4-decades of observational research, I can confidently assert that intellectual laziness is an all-too-common leadership fail. It is a myth that managers manage by the numbers.  So many leaders that I’ve observed in action simply were not skilled thinkers, having little understanding of data, statistical methods, empirical analysis, and probabilistic decision-making.  In...Read More

The Tipping Point We’ve seen many articles recently about how our society is finally demanding change related to racial bias in policing.  We are seeing reforms proposed at local, state and national levels.  Some of these proposals are small and incremental in nature while others are radical transformations.  As is typical in change efforts, these...Read More

One of the concepts that core to achieving agility is “Servant Leadership”.  There are many places that one can read about the concept, its precepts and how it can best be effectively practiced in the modern organization. The purpose of this brief blog post is to simply highlight a recent example of “Servant Leadership” within...Read More

In an earlier post, I talked about Job Descriptions and Roles.  In another, I talked about Vertical Hierarchy and Titles.  It’s time to talk about Performance Management. One of the most hated systems in many organizations is the performance review system. Every few years the griping will rise to a level where the Talent Management...Read More