This post was adapted from episode 123 of the Troubleshooting Agile podcast with Jeffrey Fredrick and Douglas Squirrel. We’re continuing with our tour through Agile Conversations and we’re up to the fear conversation. That’s when I remember enjoying writing some of the stories. And fear is really important because it’s so foundational. I consider this the original sin of unproductive conversations, in a sense. It’s kind of the root of why our conversations so often go astray. In the … [Read more...]
Trust and Test Driven-Development for People
This post was adapted from Episode 122 of the Troubleshooting Agile Podcast. This is number three in our series as we go through our new book, Agile Conversations. We’re up to Chapter Three and this chapter’s all about trust. One of the things we were having a challenge with was finding something new to say about trust, because we’ve said so much about it. You can listen and read to some of our past thoughts on trust here: The First Thing to Build is Trust Be Predictable to Build … [Read more...]
Conversations: How to Improve and Why You Won’t
This post was adapted from Episode 121 of the Troubleshooting Agile Podcast. Continuing our tour of our new book Agile Conversations, we come to our chapter on the foundational method for conversational analysis, the Four Rs. We briefly explain the value of conversational analysis, and share our observation that even highly motivated people who know how much it can help their agile teams find it hard to actually pull out a piece of paper and do an analysis. The reasons for this are very … [Read more...]
Software Factory to Feature Factory
This post was adapted from Episode 120 of the Troubleshooting Agile Podcast. The Taylorist Mindset and its Outcomes In the Taylorist mindset, management is there to debug the machine of the company. The workers are interchangeable parts. And the job of management is to fine tune the machine and monitor all of the parts to make sure they’re compliant and doing what they’re told. There is a role for motivation here. But the only motivation is negative. Just make sure that people know … [Read more...]
Undoing IT Silos: How the “Walled Garden” Anti-Pattern Gets Started
Douglas Squirrel and Jeffrey Fredrick are the authors of Agile Conversations. This is an excerpt from their recent article in MIT Sloan Management Review, Solving the Problem of Siloed IT in Organizations. Learn more at ConversationalTransformation.com. In the past decade, the growing understanding of the importance of technology to business has led to a surge in business transformations—whether the flavor is digital, DevOps, Lean, or Agile, the aim is to speed up software development by … [Read more...]
