Random Thoughts on Leadership and Life

Stories from helping organizations embrace New Ways of Working

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...

Yesterday, my colleague, Kristian Haugaard (@haugaards), asked on our Ugilic Google hangout; Which book should a mid-level manager new to Agile read during the christmas holidays? My instinctive answer was Scrum for Managers: Management Secrets to Building Agile & Results-Driven Organizations by Rini van Solingen (@solingen) and Rob van Lanen (@robvanlanen). The book is a ‘how to...

Roger Meddows Taylor probably didn’t know anything about magical moments in Agile development when he wrote the following lines of the famous Queen song A Kind of Magic back in the mid-80s: One dream, one soul, one prize, one goal, One golden glance of what should be It’s a kind of magic One of my favorite...

I recently visited a large and prestigious project. The project had already experiences massive overruns on initial estimates and was trying to grasp the situation by re-estimating the remaining work. Re-estimating a project as such is not necessarily a bad idea, but in this case, the team were doing it for the fourth time in...

I am fascinated by the application of Agile principles to non-software development disciplines. I find myself doing it constantly and often with great success. This post is about how we revitalized our project management team meetings by applying simple Agile principles like collaboration, value-driven prioritization, embracing change, etc. Before discussing the details a little background...