Random Thoughts on Leadership and Life

Stories from helping organizations embrace New Ways of Working
Five Circumstances that Will Act Like Rocket Fuel for Your Agile Transformation

After coaching several clients on their Agile journey, I have found that establishing certain circumstances improves their chances of success. The following five have an exceedingly massive impact on an Agile transformation initiative’s success or failure odds. 1) CEO support CEO sponsorship is unquestionably the biggest single difference-maker when introducing Agile; if the fairy godmother...

From Staffing by Role to Staffing by Skills

Organizations often start their Agile journeys by forming one or more teams. One of the “rules” of Agile is that a team needs to be cross-functional (able to perform all the work, from analysis to production, on their own). Many pre-Agile organizations consist mainly of specialists with very narrow but deep skill sets. It is...

When building a high-performing Agile team, or any team for that matter, you need to look at people as more than “resources”. If they were just “resources”, their contribution would be merely additive. It therefore always saddens me when I hear managers talk about employees as “resources”. Even more depressing, is when the people making up...

I’m passionate about Agile coaching and I’ve therefore decided to write a series of posts on the subject. In this first post I’ll lay the foundation by discussing what an Agile coach does. Agile coaches work at many different levels within organizations. At Ugilic, we differentiate between Transformation Coaches, Team Coaches, and Technical Coaches. Transformation...

One of the discussions I often have with clients is on full-time versus part-time Scrum Masters. Often the arguments against a full-time Scrum Master is related to cost. Typically organizations have one project manager per project and they see it as double the cost having both a dedicated Product Owner and a dedicated Scrum Master on...

On the 4th November, I talked about combining PRINCE2 and Agile (Scrum) at the Nordic Project Zone conference in Copenhagen. The audience consisted primarily of Project Managers and decision makers with a background in traditional project management. I was therefore very excited to see how my ideas on combining traditional project management and Agile, and especially my points about why...

Yesterday the first ever edition of Scrum Day Denmark was held at Microsoft’s headquarters in Hellerup near Copenhagen. The event was hosted and organized by Mads Troels Hansen (@madsth) and Ole Rich Henningsen (@olehenningsen) and Microsoft sponsored food and drinks, making it a free event for the participants. The event was structured much like Scrum Day Europe with a keynote...