Badass Agile

This week, I meet with coach, colleague, and friend Ardita Karaj to discuss her take on large enterprise transformation.

Ardita is very well known in the international Agile community. I’ve had the pleasure of working with her in the past and I admire her enthusiasm, intelligence and empathetic approach to Agile.

She also has a no-nonsense approach to and instinct for business. My favourite quote from the day is “It used to be ‘the big eats the small’. Now, ‘the fast eats the slow’.

This is a two-part interview; in the first part, we discuss Ardita’s background, letting teams and individuals have the freedom to choose their own approach and tools, and the foundations of frameworkless transformation.

Enjoy, and stay tuned for Part II later this week!

When you’re slumping, your normal routines and methods don’t work (hence the slump). Try this the next time you’re struggling to get your energy, enthusiasm or creativity going:

Surround yourself with inspiration

Break your routine to get some flow going – knock something off your list, even if you break the rule of ‘highest value targets first’

Lean on your network – talk to people who inspire and support you, and let them know you’re slumping

“How can a financial institution bring regulators along the Agile journey, to help them realize that Agile actually reduces risk?” – Julio Sanchez

Tough one. No quick fix. Finserv doesn’t like to shake up longstanding regulations and traditions. It’s a highly regulated industry.

The problem is that you have no levers to influence regulators. They don’t have to change, at least not just because you want them to

Influence will happen slowly and over time, but a lot of people read that to give themselves permission not to try. You have to make moves now or you will be behind the curve when it’s really important to make change. Here’s what you can do:

Build relationships – create meetup groups, create conversations, add people to LinkedIn

Making things – successes, innovations, high-performing teams, products, competitive differentiations – that draw attention to your cause. Nothing attracts attention like success. As you evolve, your success will demand changes to regulation, and that success is a form of leverage

Note that your successes and the increased visibility that comes with it will showcase the change that needs to happen, especially if you had to work around legislation and bend rules to get there.

“What’s the best way to transition into Scrum Master with a new CSM?” – Jon Wiggins

This is one of the things coaches are for

Let them do the job based on what they’ve learned

Get them to use Agile principles to self-inspect and adapt, to create and groom backlogs of improvements and to execute on experiments

Your job should be to teach them how to apply Scrum – which is never boilerplate – it is adaptive, and to show them those things that they cannot see (external feedback)

Hopefully the certification has given them training wheels and knowledge to apply. There are a great many things they can’t learn in those two days, and if they don’t already have them, you have to help them get them – like interpersonal skills, influence, grit, problem solving, logic, etc.

An easy way to accelerate learning and development – not to mention your effectiveness as a leader – is to do more scary things.

If you don’t flex the muscle of acting the face of fear, you’ll never get better at being courageous, and you’ll never be able to lead others – especially if you’re asking others to take risks and let go of certainty and safety.

Choose something you fear this week and take deliberate action!

What helps Agile scale and spread even more than practice excellence? How you evangelize.

It’s not enough to to be Agile amid your teams – a transformation demands ongoing and deepening conversation at every level, in every area.

Have your elevator speed ready, and start meeting people

Create situations that increase contact with the people in every corner of the org – lunch and learns, events, Q/A, attendance at town halls and other corporate events, and through digital means