Busy Week: One Podcast, and Three Videos

This has been an interesting week. Vasco Duarte interviewed me for Scrum Master Toolbox recently. The podcast was published yesterday. I also rebooted my own management Youtube channel, with three videos on how to go Agile, in a much more flexible and adaptive manner than most organizations do.

Here is a link to the Scrum Master Toolbox podcast:


We had a long talk about things that might be useful for you to know. As Vasco put it in his introduction to the podcast:

In this BONUS episode, we explore the origins and persistence of waterfall methodology in software development with management consultant Henrik Mårtensson. 
 
Based on an article where he details the history of Waterfall, Henrik explains the historical context of waterfall, challenges the mental models that keep it alive in modern organizations, and offers insights into how systems thinking can transform our approach to software delivery.
 
This conversation is essential for anyone looking to understand why outdated methodologies persist and how to move toward more effective approaches to software development.
  
In case you are wondering, this is the article Vasco mentions.

What about my own videos? 

It's a three part series on organizational improvement. The basic idea is that we are making organizational change much more difficult than it has to be.

Most organizations treat change as a complicated problem that can be solved with large, one size fits all, tightly scripted change programs.

I argue that change is in the liminal domain between complicated and complex, just like software development. That leads to very different ideas about how to make organizational changes.

In the videos, I show how clients and I have put these ideas into practice, with good results. We have used three broad principles:
  • Treat improvement like a strategic game to be played, not a process to be executed!
  • Study the demand! (Figure out what the actual problems are in each part of the organisation.)
  • Focus on the constraint(s)
Here are the videos:



This is an introduction that provides context. It shows why we need better improvement methods, and basic principles.



Part two delves a little bit deeper into how the improvement process works, and explains how we keep local changes aligned with an organization's overall strategy.



Part three delves into a lot more detail about how to start up a local improvement initiative using a 2-3 day workshop. I also tell stories about real world improvements teams have come up with, including things that are impossible to do if one follows a scripted approach, like the SAFe change roadmap.

Pretty good for one week. I do hope you find the material useful.

Be seeing you!


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