The Transformation Blog

Sadly, for many companies today, Agile is in the trough of disillusionment.  Why?  Simple -- the support needed to foster success from Agile practices requires deep, engaged cooperation to work differently across a number of enterprise departmental silos.  For those familiar with Moneyball, Billy Beanes found himself in exactly the same situation during the 2002 rebuilding season

Virtually all Agile developments project will eventually meet the user experience design process. It's inevitable. Unless you're working on something that will run unseen by anyone -- some middleware, perhaps, or an application that integrates data flow between two existing systems -- someone has to interact with the software being designed and built. Even the most compelling UX design will literally do nothing without

While those of us in the Agile community have for years fostered the values of employee empowerment and creating productive work spaces for our employees and teams, I’m increasingly bothered by the degree to which some Agile advocates place employee happiness above nearly everything else.  Is this the key to business and innovation success as some claim?  Is this a smart thing to do?  Maybe not.

We’ve all experienced it at one time in our lives or another, you “think” you’re working on a team for the collective good BUT someone is constantly demonstrating destructive, self-serving behaviors.  These individuals’ behaviors put the team’s collaboration at risk all in the vein to make themselves look smarter or more-hard working than their counterparts.  Ironically, often times that competitive, back-stabbing conduct is a direct result of the metrics put in place by the team’s leader.  So, how do you encourage peaceful, productive collaboration?

With Agile providing better and faster ways to align and deploy new software functionality to customers there is a growing reality that Enterprise IT teams are now effectively in the product and software development business.  This transition from inwardly focused IT to an outward, marketing oriented mindset is proving challenging for many Agile engineering teams lacking the...

In recent weeks, there has been increased discussion among some in the Agile PMI community who are seeking empirical proof for how and why autonomy and team empowerment actually works. What I find interesting is how difficult it is for Agilists to provide much more than anecdotal evidence supporting this foundational Agile principle.

This discussion interested me because I have reached beyond the Agile community over the last year to learn more about how human performance is influenced by our work environments and our cognitive biases

The latest research from Osterman on the state of test processes and automation revealed what those of us pursuing Agile engineering practices have known for nearly a decade… that the manner in which Test and QA are typically executed in most companies is appalling and worse, dishonors the QA and Test professionals who aspire to add real strategic value to software products and solutions.

As the march towards broad Agile adoption in larger Enterprise companies continues, the implications for changing roles and responsibilities is significant.  Companies have spent literally millions of dollars and decades training staff to master the skills and responsibilities of roles like Project Manager and Business Analyst.