Random Thoughts on Leadership and Life

Stories from helping organizations embrace New Ways of Working
How to Improve Business Agility

The newly published 2022 Business Agility Report contains insight from 296 organizations worldwide. According to the report published by Business Agility Institute, understanding your value streams and structuring your workforce and processes around them is one of three key practices to improving Business Agility. This finding is consistent with what I see when advising leaders on...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Recently I left goAgile together with two colleagues and friends (Martin Vinther and Brian Søgaard) to start a new Agile consultancy company. Shortly after we announced our decision to start on our own, two more colleagues (Kristian Haugaard and Per Beining), who have some of the same ideas about what direction we should take, decided to...