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Known as a transformational change agent, Campbell joins ALTR from Incorta and previously held leadership roles overseeing strategy and growth for Collibra, Aginity, MapR, VMware, and HP. He will spearhead expanding the open-source integration initiative ...

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Aginity LLC was founded in 2005. The company's line of business includes providing computer related services and consulting.

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Top Software Development Companies 2022 That Are Growing Fast

If you're not familiar with the episode from Seinfeld, the tl;dr of it is that George's father, Frank, is given the mantra of " to help curb his enthusiasm for angry outbursts. Impressed with its effectiveness, Kramer adopts the mantra for himself. George's childhood rival, Lloyd Braun, later cautions that this mantra doesn't address feelings, but bottles them up, and leads to huge explosive anger. And that's when he delivers the classic line: Serenity Now Serenity now..." Serenity now. Insanity Later. At the surface, it's valuable advice about controlling our emotions, and stress - but deep within this statement is also a very important guideline for delivering Agile software. And while Seinfeld isn't known for technology, it's too perfect that the backdrop of this episode has Frank, George, and Lloyd selling desktop computers. George, of course, struggles to keep up with the zen-like Lloyd, who has reached true Agile enlightenment. In fact, let's add further insult to George's unending injuries. I think Lloyd deserves to have an Agile principle named after him. Arguably, Lloyd is the given that this episode first aired in 1997 - some 4 years before seventeen people would meet at a ski resort in Utah to produce the . grandfather of Agile Agile Manifesto But before looking deeper into Lloyd's principle, let's first revisit the original Agile Manifesto's 12 principles: The highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Harness change for competitive advantage. Deliver working software frequently. Business people and developers must work together throughout the project. Build projects around motivated individuals with the environment and support they need to get the job done. Prioritize face-to-face conversations. Working software is the primary measure of progress. Promote sustainable development, where a constant pace can be supported indefinitely. Attention to technical excellence and good design to enhance agility. Preference for building on things_._ not Build self-organizing teams. Reflect on how to become more effective, and adjust. Taking a closer look at each of these, they all share the same spirit around problems we face regularly: We know that software systems only increase in complexity with time. Technical debt grows, new features creep in, scope increases, software gets bloated, developers burn out, people get frustrated, and quality decreases. You know it all. And that's where I think the matters. It matters that I believe in , with Lloyd's getting placed at index 0. Lloyd Braun Principle of Agility so much 13 Agile Principles 0. Simplicity now - complexity later; Serenity now, insanity later. There are two lessons to be learned from this one principle. The first lesson comes from the first part of the statement: We know not to over-engineer. We deliver to the baseline. The 80/20, KISS type rules. Deliver the MVP. Prioritize value. Add complexity later, and only if there's demand for it. Serenity now. But the second lesson tucked away in the second part - that is what we don't spend enough time discussing. It's not just an instruction to add complexity later - to put off the insanity. It is a warning that prioritizing simplicity means insanity come. Whether it's in explosive user growth, challenging timelines, taking on technical debt in favor of delivering value early on or maintaining legacy code that didn't scale to meet insane needs. Insanity and complexity are to be expected. Insanity later. will explains the first 6 Agile principles. Those first six offer a framework for delivering with simplicity. Serenity now is dealt with in those bottom 6 principles. Those principles help us manage the chaos: How we converse, how we measure value, how we should push back, how we should organize, and continuously evaluate and be critical of how we are working. Insanity later I hear too much about retros that don't happen or aren't taken seriously . Or I've seen too many teams that are resistant to change, or adapting Or, worst of all, managers who subvert what it means to have a self-organizing/self-managing team or who measure progress by output and not outcome. ("There's no point in bringing this up... it's not like my manager can fix it...") ("Why are we changing the process again? I thought this was working?"). Especially in this new world, we're living in - with remote teams, virtual meetings, and a renewed emphasis on work/life balance - I think it's high time we take a more holistic view of what it means to be Agile - focusing less on serenity now, and more on the insanity later. Also published here.

The Lloyd Braun Principle of Agility

Why Implementing Microservices on AWS Is Indispensable to a Modern Architecture for Business Agility

Agile stepped in when linear requirement-based processes were playing around to impose project management processes and predictable delivery methodologies across complex software domain, driven by time and output. Even with a certain percentage of success, Agile hasn't managed to kill off the embedded waterfall behaviors, prescribed linear plans and over-complex management layers for delivering software en masse. Going forward, Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) have turned out to be the most trusted and established agile software methodologies for building software in dynamic environments. The agile methodology does not resolve every software issue, but these act as a cue stick for relatively small, self-organizing teams. Introducing: The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Organizations have propelled their efforts to imbibe The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) that is meant to address scaling Agile to the enterprise level, as it quickly combines Agile approaches with more enterprise-centric organizational practices. But as enterprises undergo the broader change necessary for digital transformation success, SAFe still faces certain challenges. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is an interactive knowledge base for implementing the at an enterprise scale. It is difficult to understand the scope of SAFe for scaling agile software development to the enterprise. Agile development practices are not limited to Lean Startup, Right Shifting, Beyond Budgeting, Management 3.0, Human-Centered Design, Theory of Constraints, Cynefin, Portfolio Management, etc. Agile model How can Agile Planning turn the tides in favor of organizations? adoption, willingness to throw out a plan, know your minimum viable product, ship it, gather feedback, iterate. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just good enough for the next development cycle. Agile implies: Agile organizations have an extra ability to manage changing priorities, improved visibility, increased productivity, improved quality and reduced risk. All this leads to customer delight, joy at work, engagement, innovation, creativity and continuous learning etc. Agile organizations face the challenge of managing the local autonomy of squads (bottom-up input) consistently with a bigger picture represented by the tribe’s goals and by cross-tribe interdependencies and the strategic priorities of the organization (top-down view). Governing this tension requires new processes and routines for planning and coordination. Associated frameworks and tools are always capable of: The need for quality time to be invested for a true strategic conversation rather than simply being a numbers game; Resources and funds are available in a flexible way for emerging opportunities. And the ability to cope with more frequent and dynamic changes; Prepping-Up Enterprises for more “Agility” As the discussion unfolds, scrums, grand-masters, stand-ups, and sprints help organizations align, co-create and collaborate and leverage more operations and make their business move, let’s find out how to pursue this complex goal of adopting Agile: Let knowledge move across all layers of the organization. Create a platform to network, communicate, crowd-source the issues. Introduce and inspire self- learning and delegating the knowledge to staff. Knowledge Dispersion: Creating project teams across various business verticals (HR, Marketing, Sales and Promotion, Automation, Testing, Development, etc.), for more successful adoption of Agile based around a specific customer or project. Bringing Various Skills on the Table: Project teams allows all stakeholders to be brought into the process early. This creates a true sense of collaboration resulting in a greater sense of ownership from beginning to delivery with fewer compromises. Making a Team Build Its Efforts: Give them the tools, and make them learn. This process brings the required agility into the business. Empower your staff: Daily stand-ups are important as are an analysis of daily hurdles is important to learn and become proficient. It also helps break your production timeline into iterations, organize face to face meetings and measuring success at the end of the process. Assign Daily Tasks and Set Expectations: Agile as a Breather to Traditional Project Management Approaches A certain level of understanding is required to compile the fact that Agile methodologies alone are not sufficient to address top-down questions of business strategy. As Agile teams work bottom-up adding up the opinions of people to come up with the business strategy must be combined with centralized decision making. Companies need to imagine possibilities and pick the one for which the most compelling argument can be made. Compelling arguments need to be backed up with a qualitative judgment. In Agile Software Development organizations , teams make use of design thinking and other exploratory techniques (including data) to make rapid decisions and change the course every week. Decision making is done by a team of people, offsetting in this way the potential biases of a single person on their judgment. To some extent, an agile team-based organization enables the possibility to leverage qualitative data and judgment – combined today with infinite hard data – for better decisions. Get the minimal requirements and start working. Explore more about Agile model here: https://www.konstantinfo.com/blog/agile-model/

Inserting “Agility” into Business Enterprises

Exploding in popularity right now is a framework called GatsbyJS, a progressive web-app framework built on-top of ReactJS that includes static site generation and uses GraphQL to store and access content from any data source. Gatsby helps build blazing-fast websites and apps. developers Hundreds of thousands of developers have adopted Gatsby since it was open-sourced four years ago. Even so, just last month, the Founder of GatsbyJS, that they had raised a $15M Series A funding round, led by CRV, to drive the reinvention of website development. Kyle Mathews announced Since we just released a source-plugin for GatsbyJS + Agility CMS the other week, I was interested in learning more about it. I once again reached out to , the VP of Product and Operations here at Agility CMS. James goes in depth on why a developer should use GatsbyJS, why it’s a good fit with , its disadvantages, and how you can quickly get started. James Vidler Agility CMS What is GatsbyJS and why should developers use it? After nearly a year of research, prototyping, and testing, Gatsby their v1 in July 2017. Gatsby provides efficiency between developers, designers, and authors; it uses static site generators that offer many benefits over traditional dynamic website frameworks — including better performance, higher security, lower cost of scaling, and of course, a better developer experience. To dive into this a little bit more, I asked James to define what GatsbyJS is and why it has become so popular amongst web developers. launched “GatsbyJS is a static site generator and website framework built on ReactJS, but it’s much more than that. Sites built using GatsbyJS simplify sourcing content from external systems, are progressive web apps, and are blazing fast! The secret sauce is the build process that GatsbyJS websites use. All content is updated during a build process. It’s during this time that your external APIs are called, the data is injected into your React components, and your static HTML is generated. In the end, it’s just HTML, JS, and CSS, which means you can deploy your site to any static host. Combine that with a global CDN, and you have a site that scales infinitely and will never go down! This architecture is also referred to as JAMstack (JavaScript-APIs-Markup).  As perhaps the most well-known of the JAMstack frameworks, GatsbyJS has a thriving open source community and a world-class developer experience with tutorials for everything and loads of plugins for your favorite data sources.” Why are GatsbyJS and Agility CMS a good fit? Agility CMS is a headless CMS. A headless CMS creates an easy interface for your editors to manage content, which is then connected to your site generator by API. Agility CMS has an easy way to quickly get started using GatsbyJS, but we'll discuss that later, and I'll even show you how content creators can build and deploy the site at the click of a button, using . To start, I asked James what this meant and why you should consider using them together? Netlify “Agility CMS websites have always been built with speed in mind. We've strived to address traditional scaling and performance issues with CMS driven websites for years. With our Sync SDKs (for .NET Framework and .NET Core), we solved these issues by syncing content from our CMS to your website, ensuring that the content was always readily accessible on the web server. This meant you never had to fetch content over the internet in order to render your web pages. This has allowed Agility CMS driven websites to handle millions (and millions) of requests without a bottleneck on data access. The only limitation is the compute power of the web server itself. The more requests you have, the more horsepower you'll need to process each request and compile rendered HTML. GatsbyJS solves this same problem but in a different way. Instead of syncing content to the web server, your content is downloaded during the build process and included in your static HTML, all before it is ever deployed. The biggest improvement here is that you no longer have to run your website on a server that needs to compile your HTML on every request. The web server simply needs to return the stored HTML. This allows for an additional performance (and cost) benefit of hosting your site on a static host and makes it very easy to put a CDN in front of your website. Now, what makes Agility CMS particularly a good fit for GatsbyJS sites is that Agility CMS not only provides native support for GatsbyJS via our gatsby-source-agilitycms but with our built-in Page Management , the plugin can automatically generate your pages based off your page tree in Agility CMS. Combine this with our Page Template/Page Module architecture, and this means editors can create their own pages, add/order/remove functionality and content on each page, all without requiring assistance from a developer.” Are there any disadvantages to using GatsbyJS in comparison to a traditional website build? According to Kyle, there is a slight when building apps because it assumes you're building "pages". So, if you're building more of a straight-up app without pages, then it can "limit your freedom somewhat." Besides this, I wanted to know some other drawbacks of using GastbyJS. James describes his thoughts below. drawback to Gatsbyjs “Well, you should always use the right tool for the job. GatsbyJS shares some of the inherent challenges that come with building JAMstack websites. Because you have no backend (server-side) code, they are not a good fit if you have a dependency on lots of server-side code logic. The JAMstack pundits out there will tell you that you can move this logic to a server-less function (Netlify, AWS, and Azure all provide these types of services), and you can, but if you have legacy, or complex backend logic this could be challenging. Another thing to keep in mind as well as the amount of pages and content your website will have, and the frequency at which it will be updated. The only way a site's content can be updated is by doing a build and another deploy, to replace the static HTML files on your static host. If you have thousands of pages and content, this could range from 1-60 minutes in order for content to be updated.” How can you get started with GatsbyJS and Agility CMS? Want to get a up and running quickly with Agility CMS as the content management system? Use these repo steps below that will show you how to use the with the Blog Template in Agility CMS and Gatsby project Agility CMS Gatsby Source Plugin instantly get started! Create a FREE Agility Account Create an Agility CMS account with the Free Plan (this plan is free forever). . It only takes one second! Sign up via Agility CMS Once your account is created, you’ll need to grab your GUID and API Keys. Get the Code Make sure you have the Gatsby CLI installed: npm install -g gatsby-cli Clone the repo from GitHub that has all the code you need to get started: Agility CMS Gatsby Starter git clone https: //github.com/agility/agility-gatsby-starter.git Install the dependencies: npm install Once you’ve the infrastructure set up, run the site in development mode: gatsby develop The site is just a starter, but it has a bunch of interesting features that you can use to build from. The next step is to hook this code up to your new Agility CMS instance that you just created. Hook it up to your Agility CMS Instance Edit the file and replace the and with yours. gatsby-config.js guid apiKey You can find your API keys on the Getting Started page in the Agility CMS Content Manager. If you use the key, you won’t have to publish to see the changes you’ve made show up. If you use the key, make sure you’ve published any content you wish to see changed. preview fetch How it Works The Gatsby Source Plugin downloads all the Pages on the Agility CMS Sitemap, as well as any Shared Content that’s referenced on the property in the file. sharedContent gatsby-config.js All of those pages and content are then made available in GraphQL to the React Components you will write to render those pages. Check out the component called “Jumbotron”. This is an example of how to display a styled heading and sub-heading with content that comes from Agility CMS. Here is the Module that provides this content being edited in the Agility CMS Content Manager: And here is the code used to render it. Notice that the and fields are available as properties of the object. title subTitle item.fields src/modules/Jumbotron.js 
Copysrc/modules/Jumbotron.js: copy code to clipboard React, { Component } { graphql, StaticQuery } { 
 render() { ( <h1>{this.props.item.fields.title}</h1> <h2>{this.props.item.fields.subTitle}</h2> ) 
 }
} import from "react" import from "gatsby" import "./Jumbotron.css" export default class Jumbotron extends Component return < = > section className "jumbotron" </ > section When you add new modules and content definitions to Agility CMS, the components used to render those modules will automatically receive the strongly typed data delivered to those modules as props. Ending Notes Have you tried using Gatsby with Agility CMS? We’d love to hear your thoughts and firsthand experiences. Join the conversation via our or follow us on and share them with us! If you have any questions, we’d invite you to as well and stay tuned for lots of other awesome stuff we have in store using Gatsby! Slack community social media reach out to us (Previously published at - ) https://agilitycms.com/resources/posts/how-to-use-gatsby-with-agility-cms-as-a-headless-cms

Using Gatsby with Agility CMS as a Headless CMS [Tutorial]

A great example of strategy tightly coupled with agility/fast-product-feedback-loops: Toyota and the Toyota Production System The aim of the Toyota Production System (“TPS”) is “making the vehicles ordered by customers in the and most efficient way, in order to deliver the vehicles as as possible” (emphasis is mine). quickest quickly In other words, the TPS is the mechanism that Toyota uses to build a lean / agile / high mobility mentality into its production lifecycle from order to delivery. The TPS supports Toyota’s overall strategy of building the most reliable and lowest total-cost-of-ownership cars in the world. All workers are obligated to improve any process they can to improve speed and reduce waste in the production line. They’re not just permitted to improve, but obligated… in other words, they’re not allowed not to speak up to their manager if they see an opportunity for improvement. Why is speed so important that TPS’s objective mentions it twice? Faster design, ordering, and delivery of cars means Toyota can innovate faster, respond faster to customer needs, and have new ideas in the market faster than its competitors. Faster throughput also means less inventory and thus less resistance by dealers to push new models into the pipeline. Workers need not run ideas up a chain of command, wait for a response from a committee that meets monthly, and then implement. They can decide on the frontline, in real time, when they are in line with the overall strategy and when speed can be used in such a situation to improve responsiveness to customers. The Honda-Yamaha War In Chet Richards’ book, “Certain to Win”, he shared the story of the Honda-Yamaha War, known as the “H-Y War”. It started in 1981. If you were a young kid in Japan in the early 1980s, you likely wanted a scooter or a motorbike. Those were the dream products that reflected Japan’s newly-emerged engineering leadership, freedom, and economic growth. Yamaha opened a new factory with the expressed intent to become the world’s leading motorcycle manufacturer — a direct shot at Honda, the reigning leader. How would a typical competitor, in Honda’s role, respond? With more marketing? By opening an even bigger factory? By cutting prices? Not in this case. Honda responded as a lean startup should — by cycling as fast as possible through new models, learning from each, listening to customers, and using speed and agility as its principle strengths. Their new models evolved so fast that they influenced what the public wanted. In 1981, Honda had sixty models. Over the next eighteen months, they introduced 113 new ones. Each model was replacing a prior one; each one was more attuned to their customers. While Yamaha’s new factory could produce a large number of models, their ability to keep up with the pace of change was limited. In the same time period, they introduced only thirty-seven new models. Yamaha’s models quickly looked ancient compared to Honda’s. How was Honda able to do it? They acted like a lean startup. They operated with a fast-product-feedback-loop so fast that Yamaha wasn’t even able to register the changes and updates they were making. Yamaha was so outmaneuvered they were left confused and disoriented to the point where they surrendered and announced, “We want to end the H-Y Way. It was our fault.” Build fast-product-feedback-loops into your product outline (sometimes called “learning loops”) to create a flywheel of continuous product improvement You’re looking to build feedback loops into your products and customer experience so that every user helps you get smarter over time. Seeing what users click on (and what they don’t) are obvious UI data points, as are user feedback and rating scores. Particularly interesting, though, is when users can contribute small bits of content that become part of everyone else’s experience; those products become especially valuable. For example, with the GPS-enabled app Waze, users can press a button while driving to share the location of a speed trap or a broken-down car. Waze then uses this information to alert other drivers. A click by one driver can create a valuable improvement in the user experiences of thousands of other users. Google’s Nest thermostat claims to do something similar: when a few users adjust their thermostat, it uses that data feedback to determine how to improve its algorithm for managing all of its users’ temperature. These are examples of a positive-feedback-loop: the more a user uses a feature, the more value is created in the system. Contrast that to most physical goods sales: the more a customer handles a book in a bookstore, the less new the book looks. And more customers reading a book doesn’t help make the book better for future readers. Flywheels create network effects, which, once you have a critical mass of users become their own source of competitive advantage. Tesla outdoes them all Tesla cars send driving and user interaction data back to their engineers on a daily basis. The engineers review the data and update the operating system. The updates are then pushed out to all of the cars nightly. Tesla cars upgrade like a web-based platform does… constantly, with no work required by the user, and for no additional cost. The changes Tesla is making to the UI on the touchscreen dashboard would require a complete rebuild of the dashboard for almost all other car manufacturers. Compare that to the standard model of releasing a new version of a car once a year for those who buy the new version; those who don’t buy a new car every year get no updates. And even then, the annual updates are minor, largely uninformed by any actual data of driving activity of the prior year’s version. In short, Tesla can update its touchscreen dashboard nightly while other car manufacturers require you to buy a completely new car. When you can operate in a user-feedback-informed design and production cycle so fast that your customers and competitors can’t even register the change before you’re well onto your next update, you win. Col. Boyd called this “getting inside the other person’s decision cycle”. Also published on , where I share thoughts on building analytics-based products and businesses (e.g. “product strategy”). Any books or other resources mentioned or referenced in this article are listed . strategist.blog here

Strategy and Agility: Lessons from Toyota, Honda, Yamaha, and Tesla

By Professional Scrum Trainer, , ILLIA Pavlichenko Scrum.org In this article, I will discuss the dangerous dynamic that can arise when a Product Owner, Scrum Master, or the management of an organization focuses a Development Team on velocity. What does velocity refer to? The concept of velocity signifies: The speed at which a Development Team converts Product Backlog Items into a Product Increment that is RELEASABLE. Pay particular attention to the highlighted word. Feature velocity is applicable when a Development Team can deliver an Increment that is releasable at least once per Sprint. In this case, Done = DoD = releasable. Awesome! But even in this case velocity does not show: Whether the client’s problem was resolved. Whether team is working on the highest priority problems. Amount of value delivered. Level of client satisfaction. Velocity only shows that the team was busy with something. But is this an accurate measure of the success of the products and services? Do the clients value products based on how busy company’s staff are? To put it another way, Velocity reflects the volume of a Development Team’s output. Unfortunately, this is not enough for the creation of successful products and services. The feature velocity of component teams = 0 Component teams have the most stable feature velocity. Because it always equals zero. Component teams are by definition not able to convert Product Backlog Items into value for a client. At a minimum they need integration with other component teams. When a team has Undone work In my opinion, the most dangerous dynamic arises in cases where a Development Team is not capable of generating a Product Increment that is releasable each Sprint. This means that Done = DoD + Undone and team optimizes just the part of the whole flow. Let us examine a system diagram that shows the link between the strength of DoD and organizational agility. The stronger the DoD, the smaller Undone work in the Sprint. Undone work limits the team regarding the number of potential releases, and, as a result, also regarding the amount of feedback that can be received from the market. The more feedback, the more decisions can be made by the Product Owner on the re-ordering of a Product Backlog. That could be called organizational agility — being able to quickly change the direction of a Product’s development. This may prompt a Scrum Team to undertake additional improvements to create an even stronger and more exhaustive DoD. d By strengthening the DoD, velocity decreases an becomes real How is the strengthening of a DoD reflected in velocity? The velocity will decrease at least in the short term. But this is not a problem if the goal is flow optimization (shortest Lead Time), learning and agility. Velocity decreases and becomes more real! But how likely is it that a Development Team would strengthen the DoD, if they know that team effectiveness is evaluated according to the velocity? My answer is unlikely. Focus on velocity keeps the team away from strengthening their DoD. As a result, that inhibits feedback from market, learning and agility. Focusing on velocity inhibits organizational agility. When I was a young and an inexperienced Scrum Master many years ago, I focused my teams on velocity excessively, which reduced their agility and increased the amount of Undone work. Nowadays, my advice to Scrum Masters who are just starting out goes something like this: Forget about velocity, if your team cannot produce an increment that is releasable at least every Sprint. Focus on strengthening your DoD first. What should we measure then? I recommend focusing on metrics that show the ability to deliver actual value to the market and satisfy client’s needs. For example, Scrum.org has developed framework , and is offering a range of metrics that shows: Evidence-Based Management A team’s ability to create value in the long term The speed at which value is generated (Time 2 Market). How much actual value is delivered to the market. n In conclusio I would like to repeat once more the fundamental idea that I want to convey with this article. The basic idea of a Scrum is to create an increment that is releasable at least every Sprint. If your team is already at that stage, then the concept of velocity is useful and genuinely demonstrates the speed at which a team converts Product Backlog Item elements into an increment. If not, please focus on strengthening Definition of Done (DoD) and flow optimization. The Article’s Main Ideas Velocity denotes the speed at which a Development Team converts Product Backlog Items into a Product Increment that is releasable. Velocity does not show whether clients’ problems are being resolved, nor whether value is being delivered, as reflects volume of output. Velocity only shows that a team was busy with something. The feature velocity of component teams is always zero. When team focuses on velocity and has Undone, it is unlikely they would strengthen the DoD. Focusing on velocity inhibits organizational agility. Focus on the value that is actually delivered to the market. Scrum ON! Originally published at agilix.nl on February 15, 2019.

Why focus on Velocity inhibits Agility

By: Gunther Verheyen , Professional Scrum Trainer, Scrum.org Agility is a unique and continuously evolving state that is typical to a specific organization, given an organization’s people, set-up and history. A traditional (industrial) approach to becoming more Agile commonly creates no more than an illusion of agility. However, many of our organizations have their roots, and their beliefs, in the past industrial age. As they feel the need and the pressure to increase their agility, they naturally revert to familiar, yet old-school, industrial recipes. They undertake cautiously planned attempts to shift to the Agile paradigm (although they need to leap), wrapping them in separate change projects. They look around and imitate what other organizations do. They copy-paste what others, regardless whether they operate in the same economical domain or not, claim brought them success. They enforce processes and practices in a cascaded and mass-production way. They rely on text-book models that prescribe generic pre-empted blueprints organizational structures. The learnings and the hard work needed needed to acquire sustainable agility tuned to the organization’s specific context are conveniently ignored. Ironically, these are the exact approaches that block them in their growth, the ways of working that they need to abandon in order to enter and survive the new worlds, the worlds that require a higher agility. The mismatch is fundamental. They need and want to hose down their industrial ways, yet reinforce them. No more than an is created, which is painfully revealed when, often after several years, the hits hard. In the face of the urgency, the increase in agility is negligible. The actual results are disappointing. illusion of agility deflation by reality What was hoped would be achieved is not achieved. The people creating a company’s products and services are not more engaged or motivated (rather they keep leaving and no new talents can be attracted). The people funding the work are not more pleased (not achieving the gains and returns hoped for). The people buying and consuming the organization’s products and services are not more satisfied (and usage and satisfaction keep declining). Overall, the old predominant disconnectedness is not resolved. The traditional top-down line organization with its typical silo structure and separation of skills and expertise is not replaced with team work, shared purpose and commitment. Blaming keeps taking precedence over collaboration. Increasing agility is a path. Progressing on that path requires vision, belief, persistence and… . Agility, as a state of high adaptiveness, can only be achieved by regularly… adapting. Adaptations only make sense upon inspections of actual work and observable results. Think feedback loops (all around). The new reality, for which agility is needed, says that works today might not work tomorrow. What works for one company (a complex system of interconnected people, processes, tools) might not work for another company. What works for one combination of teams, technology and business might not work for another combination. hard work Signposts that might keep you from getting stuck in an illusion of agility are: It is not a transformation if it doesn’t change how you work. It is not an Agile transformation if it doesn’t simplify how you work. It is not an adoption of Scrum if it doesn’t engage and energize people (customers, teams, stakeholders). The new reality tells us to act in the moment more than we ever did before. Embracing uncertainty and unpredictability has a great potential too. Getting the most out of the possible thrives upon acceptance of the unwritten state of the future and what that future might bring. It reminds us that we are not alone in this, that each individual, no matter their function, level, position or silo, can contribute. Living the art of the possible against unpredicted outcomes has the option of engaging people as it shapes future. Acceleration comes from vision, determination and dedication; from the courage to move away from following a plan or copying a model. their Regardless an organization’s past attempts and choices, reverting to the path of hard work is always a workable way out. More Agile teams does not make a more Agile organization. (Thank you, , for your professional expertise in video creations and for the graphics) Higher View Jellylab Originally published at guntherverheyen.com on January 7, 2019.

The Illusion of Agility (What Most Agile Transformations End Up Delivering)

By & , originally published on Chris Lukassen Sjoerd Kranendonk Scrum.org By now, most organizations are using Scrum, however, many of them feel like the agility of their organization has degraded, and they might be right! Often, using Scrum starts out as a way to improve development efforts coordinated within an IT division or department, but that is not the most effective organization structure to potentially get maximum benefit from Scrum. Inclusive Scrum is about looking at the full value chain and organizing your Product development effort around that. Whereas low agility Scrum might actually hurt your agility. Three symptoms that indicate low-agility Scrum Most of the time this means your Scrum Teams are exclusively made up of members of the IT department. Your Scrum Teams have a Definition of Ready that demands a full ‘design’ before an item can be planned in the Sprint. After your Scrum Teams deliver a backlog item as ‘Done’ it has to wait for business implementation before actually being of added value Your Sprints are two weeks, but your actual time from idea to validation is over two months Sound familiar? As a result many in “the business” just shrug when you mention Scrum, to them little has changed. Apart from teams making more noise and a ludicrous of wall decoration in the shape of self adhesive colorful square pieces paper, little has changed. Three reasons why you should look at the full value chain (business agility) RESPONSIVENESS — The ability to create real cross-functional teams minimizes handovers, queues and wait times. Your Time to Learn will potentially shrink to less than your Sprint length, increasing agility and reducing risk. QUALITY OF FEEDBACK — These teams can take true ownership of the problem-solution fit as they can talk to and validate against actual users and customers. The quality & fidelity of feedback goes up because distance is minimized. Time wise: less time between each step in the process and thus less time between decision and validation (feedback). Distance wise: Less distance between decider/builder/consumer; less handovers, less knowledge lost in translation. Both reduced time and reduced distance increase the quality of feedback and potentially the amount of knowledge. Solving customer problems is about feeling empathy and seeing the pain of the customer — the difference between first hand feedback and reading about a user’s actions in a Jira ticket is mind boggling. Additional benefits are highly motivated teams as they now experience the impact of their work instead of just get reports about it. VALUE STEERING — Only when the full value chain is taken into account can short and long term decisions be made about investments and potential returns. Only when the full cost of an investment (spending time on a Backlog Item) per time unit can be known, can we truly make the best possible decisions on what to invest in next. Where to place our educated bets. Case Study: UX in Scrum Many teams we’ve worked with have struggled with the role and place of UX (User Experience) in Scrum. When should UX work take place? Where should the UX specialist be involved? In Sprint? As part of Product Backlog Refinement? Should the UX-specialist be part of the ‘design sub-team’ working a sprint ahead to make sure the Backlog is continually refined (together with the business analyst and a shared architect)? This ‘seperate team’ pattern results in the ‘delivery sub-team’ being reduced to axe-grinding, code-wielding (programmers & testers), do we want this? Or could the UX specialist be part of a self-organizing Scrum Team, as part of the Development Team, working closely with their development co-teamies, a Product Owner (if present) and Stakeholders? backlog lumberjacks As with any other part of the product development process, we should try to apply the UX tools of the trade just-in-time and with just-enough detail depending on the situation. Some research work will be part of Product Backlog Refinement, while more detailed Ux-development will be conducted in close concert with actual technical development and i.e. A/B validation can take place during the in-Sprint testing phase (or as soon after Sprint end as possible). Let’s look at 3 approaches to research UX requirements Research outside of the Scrum Team Research as part of Backlog Refinement (before items are planned) In Sprint Research 1. Research outside of the Scrum Team A common scenario is where UX research is done outside of the Scrum Team, or at least outside of the Development Team. UX experts engage with (potential) customers to discover why they should be using the product. What “job” is the product hired to do? These engagements often reveal interesting insights in the world of the user, recurring patterns, filters, assumptions and biases. This type of research is done by talking to the customers or even better; observing customers to build empathy and really engage in their perspective. By separating the UX research from the implementation, most of this “warm”, experiential information gets lost in translation during the handover. By compressing several days of interaction and observation into a Backlog Refinement or capturing it in written documentation, this loss is inevitable. Even worse, when this information sits in the Backlog for a longer period of time until it is acted upon, the data has turned stale and possibly is no longer the most accurate description of the customer’s needs. Through these handovers and longer time between research and implementation, this approach has a very low ability to adapt or profit from emerging insights. The Sprint Review has UX as a stakeholder to provide feedback to the Scrum Team on how they interpreted their findings and analysis of customer needs. Based on the Product Increment shown, the UX specialist can design and conduct further research that feeds back in the Product Backlog for at least one Sprint later. The distance between initial research and (UX) feedback is about 3–4 Sprints at a minimum hence fidelity & quality are low. The focus is mostly on how much the current Product Increment is different from what the user actually wants/needs. 2. Research as part of Backlog Refinement Much of the waste of handovers can be reduced if research done by members of Scrum Team. The fewer the handovers, the closer to actual development in both time and communication distance. Still, the separation of development and research leads to small handovers and wait times for instance with extra questions and emerging insights. Sprint Review is with real users providing feedback on slightly adapted versions of test designs and recent interpretations of their previous responses. Distance between initial research and user feedback is at least one Sprint, mostly two or more. Fidelity is ok. Focus is mostly on refining the Product Backlog to increase usability and value based on the working product. 3. In-Sprint Research As we say in Dutch, ‘zit dicht op de bal’ (keep the ball close). This means that not only can the actual development team be involved in the research, potentially the research is part of actual development, so the subjects (stakeholders) partaking in the research are on-hand in the Sprint and emerging insights can immediately be retested or collaborated on as they pop up. No handovers and little to no wait time when adapting from emerging insights. Sprint Review is with real users working on innovations and improvements in unrealized value, since the features delivered have already (partially) been proven to fit customer needs and adjusted during development. Distance between research and user feedback is between a day and a few Sprints. Mostly within one Sprint. Fidelity is high as adjustments to better fit user needs were mostly already made within the Sprint. Focus is almost exclusively on next steps. Conclusion: optimize the whole with Inclusive Scrum Scrum doesn’t solve your problem, or as Ken Schwaber once explained: “Scrum is like your mother in-law; very good in pointing out your mistakes.” Many organizations feel like Scrum slowed them down, because it exposes problems that have long been hidden. By applying an “Inclusive Scrum” mindset, the whole of the system — including UX — is optimized for complex work, not just the development. How is your team doing? Where can you start the discussion around better collaboration and improving flow & quality? Do you need help? Let us know in the comments! Want to know more? This article is a collaboration effort. It was conspired, developed and written by Chris Lukassen & Sjoerd Kranendonk , two Professional Scrum Trainers with a love for great products and the people developing them. In our work we often encounter organizations and teams that struggle with Scrum as a value maximization framework. Mostly this boils down to Scrum Teams being sub-optimally aligned with the actual Product and parts of the process still being done in a waterfall mindset. If this sounds familiar, please feel free to comment below or contact us and we will be glad to help. References Originally published at sjoerdly.com .

Is Scrum Hurting Your Agility?

While agile gains traction year over year and most practicing organizations acknowledge most of the benefits, the (2018) unveils: 12th Annual State of Agile Report ‘only 4% [of respondents] report that agile practices are enabling greater adaptability to market conditions’. So, while we’re all increasingly delivering according to agile practices, the needle is hardly moving when it comes to business agility. And yet, under pressure of fierce market changes, leadership is trying to turn the wheel towards innovation. Agile and operations Historically, agile has been welcomed by organizations to improve operations with short, more responsive feedback loops enabled by iterative delivery. Agile transformation, however, was often not intended to change the process deciding what gets executed, but merely to make execution itself more efficient. No feedback loop was implemented covering both strategy and execution, hence the lack of business agility. Management is traditionally reluctant to leave its strategy-structure-systems approach, maintaining a top-down instructional model. Unfortunately, in an environment where organizations are forced to try out ‘new’ things, the value of what gets executed is not so certain anymore. Operations and innovation Innovation has many definitions, but when it comes to methods and frameworks, its most important aspect is uncertainty. If an organization wants to be able to respond faster to changing market conditions, it needs to deal better with uncertainty. Steve Blank, the most promising approach for succesfull innovation in established organizations is by having operational teams adopt the ‘innovation stack’. According to these curricula [innovation stack] teach what it takes to turn an idea into a deliverable product/service by using the scientific method of hypothesis testing and experimentation outside the building. This process emphasizes rapid learning cycles with speed, urgency, accepting failure as learning, and innovation metrics. And this absolutely makes sense: Operational teams are closest to the action, often acquiring vital feedback first-hand. Innovation is a numbers game. With a low hit-ratio, the number of attempts determines the possibility of succes. For an established organization, adoption of new practices is at least as hard as finding and validating a good idea. Operational teams serve as a better catalyst compared to outside-of-business or management enforced initiatives. Traditionally, in established organizations, agile has been the tool to improve horizon 1 activities. Given the known business model, it is being used to (continuously) improve the supporting processes. From that perspective, dealing with uncertainty is usually limited to managing changing user requirements. https://steveblank.com/2015/06/26/lean-innovation-management-making-corporate-innovation-work/ Horizon 1 activities support existing business models. Horizon 2 is focused on extending existing businesses with partially known business models Horizon 3 is focused on unknown business models. Agile and innovation Solutions have blindly been copied across industries and markets, assuming comparable results and outcomes would follow. Leadership assumes ‘ ’ and ‘ ’ and orders operational teams to compile the same. we know how to do this we want one of those In the consumer market, uncertainty is better understood and accepted, but for enterprise initiatives, there is a bias to overestimate what is known. ‘ ’ doesn’t sound very , does it? As a result, operational teams are involved in horizon 2 activities, without support of the proper frameworks to deal with the related uncertainty. I don’t know professional As Steve Blank : notes Trying to integrate new, unbudgeted, and unscheduled innovation projects into an engineering organization that has line item budgets for people and resources results in chaos and frustration. One of the recurring complaints of agile teams is indeed the mismatch between their iterative approach, enterprise budgets and deadlines. Management, however, ‘ ’. As such, these complaints get ignored. Unfortunately, more than once, the complaints are a symptom of a more profound problem: uncertain business outcome. has a business to run Someone should acknowledge and name this uncertainty. Only then could the organization move on and adopt the right tools up to the discovery challenge at hand. Agile teams should expand their multi-disciplenary skills with the innovation toolkit, popularized by the Lean Startup movement and further evolved as Lean Product Management, allowing them to experiment, challenge and validate expected business outcome instead of blindly accepting it as a fact.

Why Agile isn’t Delivering Business Agility

One of the biggest obstacles in changing the way your company works is undoing the years, often decades, of institutionalised inertia of “the way things have always been done.” There’s comfort in doing things the same way. It made us successful. It made us big! And, perhaps the most persuasive argument: no one ever got fired for doing it that way. So much of our organisational change efforts are focused on undoing these ways of working but, stay with me for a second, what if these etched-in-stone practices are actually the best and fastest way for us to become more agile? I had the pleasure recently of listening to share his wisdom from years of transformational leadership. One thing Jon pointed out is that in the same way a martial artist uses her opponent’s momentum to improve her position in a fight you can use the things your organisation is good at — your internal, historical momentum — to promote better ways of working. It may sound unintuitive. How can being an organisation obsessed with meetings or building consensus with committees, for example, be good for driving org-wide agility? Jonathan Smart It all depends how you use those tactics. Here are two examples: — I had a client recently who listed out all the things they were particularly good at as a company. One of those things was project management. They were proud of their PjM’s and the work they did. Now, you know as well as I do that traditional project management flies in the face of many Agile practices. I have, on several occasions, talked about the inevitable death of project management as we know it today as Agile practices increase and improve. Nevertheless, this client had recently decided to build a that required stringing together several departments, existing content, a few new landing pages and coordination with procurement and accounting. There were lots of moving parts and the team was on a tight, seasonal launch deadline. What to do? Project management to the rescue. The team brought in one of their top PjM’s to bring the experiment online in an orderly fashion and on deadline. Their ability to execute a list of tasks, manage the tasks to a deadline and coordinate the various people involved ensured their experiment got the exposure it needed to their target audience. “We’re great at project management!” wizard of oz MVP — Stop me if you’ve heard that phrase before. Ok, I you’ve heard it before. That said, how can this predictive, static, 100 year old practice be used to increase agility? Well, it depends on what gets discussed and presented during financial planning season. Yes, you still talk about budgets. But you’re funding and you’re funding it becomes the change that increases agility. We also change how we measure success. Here’s how another one of my clients did it. With decades of practice at it, financial planning season was one of my client’s strong suits. To increase their agility they maintained the focus on the “season” but changed a few things. First, they reduced the requirements for each “business case” required to get funding for next year’s initiatives. Instead of a 20–30 page slide deck, they asked for a single sheet pitch, similar to a . Teams were expected to speak to their one-sheeters with context, justification and assumptions (listed from low to high risk) about their funding request. The assumptions included a list of features they were considering building. If approved, each team would get an “annual” budget but would only receive a quarter of it. At the end of each quarter, each team would present its work for the quarter, report on progress, what they chose to build, what fell by the wayside and what is coming up. The finance team would then be able to make (slightly) more real-time decisions about whether this initiative was still worth funding. If they saw proper progress, the team would get another quarter’s worth of funding to continue working. This way financial planning season began being distributed over the course of the year. The amount of effort that had gone in each fall was reduced significantly and, seeing the transient nature of features on a quarterly basis, helped the finance team reduce its obsession (over time) with feature-centric, delivery-centric ROI for each round of funding. “Our financial planning season has become an annual tradition” know what how business model canvas Each of these clients took one thing they were already good at doing — project management and financial planning in these cases — and used them to their benefit. Instead of fighting to change these ingrained practices they found value in refocusing this energy towards more agile ways of working. The end result was organisational change that felt more natural and less combative to those involved. It allowed people to do what they were already good at doing and still help the company progress. Does this sound like something you might be able to use at your company? What are you already good at doing? Make a list then pick one of those practices and see how you can use it to increase the success of your Agile teams. Good luck! [Jeff]@jboogie www.senseandrespondpress.com jeff@gothelf.co P.S. — I am extremely excited to share that Debbie Madden’s new book, , from is now available for purchase. . Hire Women Sense & Respond Press Get your copy here Upcoming Events Applying 3 Core Principles of Innovation to Improve Your Hiring Process — a free webinar with Nicole Rufuku — Sep 25, 2018 2-Day Certified Scrum Product Owner Course with Jeff Patton — New York City — Nov 15–16, 2018 (Over 50% of tickets already sold out. Get in now to save a place for your team.) This post was originally published to my newsletter subscribers (14.5k of them now). If you’d like to get these in your inbox sign up here . . As always, if you want me to work directly with your company on training, coaching or workshops on the topics of organizational agility, digital transformation, product discovery and agile leadership, don’t hesitate to reach out or consider micro-hiring me for short, remote consultations. Each consultation slot is 60 minutes long, you send me your topics in advance, we exchange a couple of emails to set context and then connect via video conf for the scheduled time. Pick a time that works for you

What if “the way we’ve always done things” is the fastest way to agility?

Agile Maturity and Agility Assessment (Webinar #2 Replay)

TL;DR: Webinar Agile Maturity and Agility Assessment Join our second webinar agile maturity and learn more about the poll results what indicates an agile organization, whether agile maturity is a fad, and what the open source project of the ‘Agility Assessment Framework’ is about on April 24, 2018 from: 06:00 to 07:00 PM CEST (Central European Summer Time) 12:00 to 01:00 PM EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) 09:00 to 10:00 AM PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) The webinar agile maturity will take about 45 minutes and is of an educational nature. So, there will be no selling of ebooks or online courses whatsoever. Please note that registering for the webinar does not guarantee your participation. The number of seats in the webinar is limited to 100. Zoom will allocate the seats on a first-come-first-serve basis. Join the “Webinar Agile Maturity” on April 24th, 2018 Join the webinar on at and ! Agile Maturity & Agility Assessment Tuesday, April 24th, 2018 6 pm CEST (12 pm EDT or 9 am PDT) download the invitation Hands-on Agile Webinar #2: Agile Maturity and Agility Assessment — April 24th, 2018 📅 Hands-on Agile Webinars : Download your invitations May 8th, 2018: Webinar #3: Product Backlog Anti-Patterns All webinars are aired from 06:00 to 07:00 PM CEST. (That is 12:00 to 01:00 PM EDT or 09:00 to 10:00 AM PDT.) Note: Webinar Agile Maturity — Related Articles How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams — The Results of the Agile Maturity Survey Agile Audit: How Is Your Agile Transition Progressing? Do you want to read more like this? Well, then: 📰 Join 16,261 peers and sign-up for my weekly newsletter 🐦 Follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my blog Age of Product 💬 Alternatively, join 3,000-plus peers of the Slack team “Hands-on Agile” for free . was first published on Age-of-Product.com. Webinar #2: Agile Maturity and Agility Assessment — April 24th, 2018

Hands-on Agile Webinar #2: Agile Maturity and Agility Assessment

TL;DR: How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams Is every organization suited to become ‘agile?’ If so: How to measure agility? And if not: Wouldn’t it be great figuring that out before embarking on a futile and expensive journey? Back in October and November 2017, I ran a . In total, 86 people participated. Based on their answers, I aggregated a preliminary taxonomy of agility related factors. survey to identify contributing factors to an organization’s or a team’s agile maturity This taxonomy was first presented on the . Hands-on Agile Berlin meetup on November 30th, 2017 On February 3rd, 2018, 20-plus people will join a hackathon to build an agility assessment framework based on this taxonomy. The goal of the workshop is to provide the first version of a tool that empowers agile practitioners to measure agility, be it an organization’s suitability for agile practices or a team’s progress on its path to becoming agile. How to Measure Agility: The Current State Measuring agility is nothing new. There are plenty of tools and approaches available, starting with Crisp’s to James Shore and Diana Larson’s model. Measuring agility of prospective clients has become a valued presales tool for many consultancies, too. Scrum Checklist Agile Fluency™ What is missing today, though, is an open-source and thus widely available framework that any agile practitioner can use to get an understanding of her organization’s or team’s level of agility. How to Measure Agility: Future Steps On February 3rd, 2018, 20-plus people will join a hackathon to build an agility assessment framework based on taxonomy described below. The goal of the workshop is to provide the first version of a tool that empowers agile practitioners to measure agility. ‘Agility’ could be an assessment of an organization’s suitability for agile practices, providing an idea of the necessary steps for an organization that decided to become a learning organization. Questions that come to mind are, for example: Where are we now? Where do we want to go? What are the necessary steps to get there? Design a plan how to get there The Berlin hackathon will be an experiment. For example, I wonder if we can apply analytical thinking–such as measuring factors and calculating states — to complex social systems? Or will that approach turn out to be a dead end? How to Measure Agility: The Original Survey Questions The 2017 agile maturity survey comprised of four questions: What factors contribute to a team’s growing maturity in agile practices? What maturity levels do you see at a team level? What factors contribute to becoming an ‘agile’ or a learning organization? What maturity levels do you see at an organizational level? In total, 86 people participated in the survey: 13 from the corporation I am currently supporting and an additional 73 participants from the Age-of Product mailing list. , a 180-plus pages strong ebook on transitioning an organization to agile principles. It is free. Download the “Agile Transition — A Hands-on Guide from the Trenches” How to Measure Agility: Preliminary Agile Maturity Indicators From the answers, I derived the following taxonomy of indicators of agile maturity: People and teams: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose Organizational Excellence Technical Excellence Communication & Collaboration (The slides of the presentation are available on .) SlideShare Let us dive deeper into the details of measuring agility: People and teams: Autonomy Self-organization: Empower teams (Decisions, accountability) Focus on outcome Respect Scrum values (Commitment, focus, openness, respect, courage.) Safety to raise & discuss issues The team handles its own problems (No scrum mom.) Supporting each other as team members (Bonding.) Holding each other accountable (Agile is a team sport.) Accountability (of the individual): Choosing tools & devices (e.g. software) Please click the “clapping hands” 👏, if you found this post useful–it would mean a lot to me! If you prefer a notification by email, please sign-up for my weekly newsletter and join 13,873 peers. People and teams: Mastery Learning: Short feedback loops (User tests, customer development) Use of retrospectives Continuous team coaching (Guilds, code mentors etc.) Stakeholders live up to their responsibilities Hands-on experience over credentialism Competence: T-shaped people Active knowledge sharing Continuous learning No withholding of knowledge Knowledge sharing beyond the product and tech realm Budget to attend conferences Center of Excellence for Agile Team building: Cross-functional teams: No dependencies w/ other teams, End-to-end delivery capability Stable, long-living teams Support by an experienced scrum master People and teams: Purpose Inclusion Product discovery Product roadmap creation Release planning Organizational Excellence Culture: Embrace and celebrate failure (Validate hypotheses by running experiments) Curiosity as a norm Undogmatic attitude, live Shu-Ha-Ri: Transparency: Share information and data at all levels, No more gated information or information brokers Leadership: Focus on innovation, quality and business value (No more HIPPOism.) Supports of ‘agile’s way of working’ fully Enforces ‘agile’ as the core of the company culture Respect for roles, principles, and processes (The ‘real’ PO.) Management: Managers to servant leaders Trust in people and teams Provides tools and facilities necessary to become agile Gemba and Kaizen become standard practices. Organizational Design: Abandon functional silos for cross-functional teams Remove redundant middle management layers (Flatten the hierarchy) No more command & control, compliance driven management HR aligns with requirements of self-organizing teams The organizations morphs into a team of teams Clear objectives: Shared vision among all actors Clear strategy Clear priorities Business value focus: Customer centricity mindset Delivering business results Shifting the IT focus business needs From project budgets to product teams. Technical Excellence Engineering level: Built-in quality: Code reviews, TDD (Test automation, test coverage) Pair and mob programming Practicing Scrum, Kanban, XP. Process level: DevOps: CI, CD (Deployment at will) Regular cadence of releases Identifying suitable metrics: Lead time, cycle time, Number of experiments, Team health Open sourcing code. Communication & Collaboration Trust & respect: Benefit of the doubt for colleagues Safety to disagree Honesty Candid peer feedback. Conflict resolution: Constructive disagreement (Disgree, but commit approach.) Non-violent communication. Collaboration: Zero tolerance for political games No scripted collaboration No incentives to withhold knowledge (Or information.) No finger-pointing, no blame-game. How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams — The Conclusion Measuring elements of agility at an organizational or team level is nothing new. This ‘agility assessment framework’ approach, however, is new as it aims to be the first open-source and thus widely available tool for all agile practitioners. It is unlikely that the first planned workshop will deliver more than a rudimentary prototype of the agility assessment framework. However, it will be a start to gather more insights by applying the framework to real-life work situations and take it from there. Hopefully, we will be able to establish a community around the ‘agility assessment framework’ in the future. ✋ Do you want to read more like this? Well, then: 📰 Join 13,873 peers and sign-up for this weekly newsletter 🐦 Follow me on Twitter and subscribe to my blog Age of Product 💬 Alternatively, join 2,300-plus peers of the Slack team “Hands-on Agile” for free … was first published on Age-of-Product. How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams — The Results of the Agile Maturity Survey

How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams

A presentation on the mindset, platform, and capabilities needed for organizational transformation, given at the Nextea Innovation Gate Seminar in Milano, Italy. Transformation is driven by an acknowledged need to grow and change, followed by thinking differently about the old ways and means. The term transformation originated with biology and genetics. In short, biological transformation refers to the introduction of something organic and systemic that can change the essential nature of a cell. Its purpose is to invoke change. The transformative process is nearly identical for every organization today: introduce a new goal, add the variable, and transform it into creativity and innovation. Why compete on the same playing field when you can invent a whole new one and make up the rules as you go along? Find out from this presentation that I gave at a Event. Nextea Copyright © 2016 by Faisal Hoque. All rights reserved. . . . . . I am an . Founder of and other companies. Shadoka enables aspirations to lead, innovate, and transform. Shadoka’s accelerators and solutions bring together the management frameworks, digital platforms, and thought leadership to enable innovation, transformation, entrepreneurship, growth and social impact. entrepreneur and author SHADOKA Author of “ ” (McGraw Hill) and “ ” (Motivational Press). Follow me on Twitter . Everything Connects — How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation and Sustainability Survive to Thrive: 27 Practices of Resilient Entrepreneurs, Innovators, and Leaders Faisal Hoque Use the Everything Connects leadership app and Suvvive to Thrive resiliancy app for free.

How To Transform And Lead In The Age of Agility And Innovation

The ecosystem has become huge since Facebook made the API public. More so, great libraries have been built in the declarative style adopted by React. React However, real life applications require making AJAX requests to servers. And this can pose a great challenge while using React. You need to know what library to use for your AJAX processes. It’s good to know that there are different ways to handle AJAX with React. This is one of the beauties of React as a — . VIEW library flexibility How to make AJAX request with React Within React component. Delegate Relay. Delegate Redux. 1. Within React Component This is the simplest and the most common approach for AJAX requests. Here, the AJAX request is issued directly in the lifecycle method of your component. Things can get messed up this way as your application grows. componentDidMount A request to Github API to get user details looks like this: Basic implementation of AJAX within React component Let’s test it out… Basic implementation of AJAX within React 2. Delegate Relay allows you to declare the data requirements for your components with GraphQL. And relay makes them available via props. Relay Relay is elegant for building large applications — but it has some overhead. This ranges from learning relay and GraphQL to setting up GraphQL servers. A sample relay flow could look thus: https://facebook.github.io/react/blog/2015/03/19/building-the-facebook-news-feed-with-relay.html 3. Delegate Redux is built off of for managing React application’s state. With Redux, you move your application data and AJAX processes away from your components. Redux Flux architecture Redux workflow example From the diagram, you can see how the application state and asynchronous processes are moved to the store. is an object that holds the complete state of your app. Note that in Redux, all application states are stored as a single object. The only way to change its state is by . With this implementation, you maintain a single source of truth across your application. Store dispatching actions are just pure functions that take the previous state and an action and then return the new state. It does not mutate state; it makes a copy of the previous state, transforms it, and returns a new state to the store. The store then updates the view with the new state if there are changes. Reducers , given the same arguments, should calculate the next state and return it. No surprises. No side effects. No API calls. No mutations. Reducers are synchronous and passive, thus not the ideal place for async actions. Reducers (previousState, action) => newState How then should you handle operations with side effects? Redux async libraries comes to rescue: Redux-promise Redux-thunk Redux-saga They are Redux middlewares for handling async tasks and side effects in your React/Redux application. uses Flux standard actions and promises to bring clear conventions to async calls. It’s the least popular among the three. It is a middleware function that receives a promise and dispatches the resolved value of the promise. It basically returns a promise to the caller so that it can wait for the operation to finish before continuing. Redux-promise allows an action creator to return a function instead of an action object. This way, the action creator becomes a . Redux-thunk thunk A is a function that is created, often automatically, to assist a call to another function (e.g API endpoint). A thunk wraps an asynchronous operation in a function. thunk When an action creator returns a function, that function will get executed by the Redux Thunk middleware. This function doesn’t need to be pure; thus, it is allowed to have side effects, including executing asynchronous API calls or router transition. The function can also dispatch actions. To enable Redux Thunk, we use . applyMiddleware() If Redux Thunk middleware is enabled, any time you attempt to dispatch a function instead of an action object, the middleware will call that function with dispatch method as the first argument. Check as , the creator of Redux, and Redux-thunk gives a detailed explanation of use cases. here Dan Abramov We can dispatch both plain object actions and other thunks, which lets us compose the asynchronous actions in a single flow. Basic AJAX request with redux-thunk middleware Redux-thunk is easy to learn with relatively small API — Just ten lines of code. But can be difficult to test. Let’s test it out … Implementing AJAX with redux-thunk Still curious, see another example. Async action is a Redux middleware that eliminates the complexity of asynchronous processes within your React/Redux application. It leverages the power of to make async tasks easy to test, write, and reason. Redux-saga ES6 generators Redux-saga manages async request and side effects in a more terse way than other middlewares for this. It reduces complexities in such requests by making blocks to just simple instructions. More so, it makes your code declarative, more testable and readable. Whereas you could use R and R together, Sagas are just the thing to cure your complex workflow pains. callbacks, promises, try/catch edux-thunk edux-saga When your store needs to handle complex async operations, consider using Redux-saga. It handles asynchronous operations as simple instructions. Redux-saga manages async tasks elegantly, keeping your reducer pure. A) Define Sagas Saga Sagas are generator functions. It uses the ES6 generator. Check out article on Kyle Simpson’s Basics of ES6 generator. Generators are functions that can be paused and resumed. Because of the way generators work, Redux-saga is able to make complex asynchronous workflows look synchronous. We have two sagas to complete this operation: and . Sagas are identified by * in front of the function. watchRequest loadUserDetails Redux-saga API exposes some methods which we need to complete our task: is an effect creator that runs a function with optional parameters. It suspends the generator as the result returned is a promise. The generator is resumed when the promise is resolved or rejected. call is an effect creator for making non-blocking calls on a function. fork cancels any current operation and return the result of the latest action that matches its pattern. takeLatest returns the result of all actions that matches its pattern. takeEvery simply puts/dispatches actions to specified channel put (an object used to send and receive messages). Check out the for more. documentation . Back to our code watches for LOAD_USER_REQUEST actions to be dispatched. takeLatest It then makes a non-blocking call to with the returned action object. In this case, the action type and username. loadUserDetails runs the function with the payload(i.e username) and resolves the value assigned as call gitHubApi user. Now, dispatches LOAD_USER_SUCCESS with the user value back to the store. put Finally, if the operation fails, it’s good practice to dispatch failure action, which in our case is LOAD_USER_FAILURE. B) Mount Sagas on the store Mount Sagas to the store To make the store’s state and functions available to the React component, provides: React-redux function — connects a React component to a Redux store. connect — a higher order component to make the store available to all container components in the application without passing it explicitly. Provider component 3) Connect React component to Redux store Connect React connect React component to Redux store let’s test it out … Sample implementation of AJAX with React and Redux-saga. Wrap up AJAX operations in your React application are better handled with Redux async libraries. When using Redux, Separation of concern is key. More so, if your React/redux application requires making async operations, use Redux-thunk or Redux-saga to handle it with agility and elegance. Making async requests within your reducers is an anti-pattern and should be avoided. don’t put AJAX in your React components. Check out the source code on . Github Many thanks to , , and for taking out time to go through the draft. Emmanuel Isaac AbdulQudus Abiodun Shuaib Oluwafemi Sule This article was originally published on . You can check it out . Note: Codementor here In case I missed out on anything, drop your feedback, comments and questions in the comment section. If you find this article useful, recommend it to others by hitting 💚 and also by sharing on social media.

Handling AJAX In Your React Application With Agility

In this post, I’m going to share my experience integrating an Android App I worked on with . However it’s important to first establish what continuous integration is all about, and why it is important. CircleCI At the heart of the agile methodology is continuous software delivery. A typical iteration in the agile process comprises some planning, analysis, design, testing(TDD), implementation, some more tests, and of course, deployment. Usually we work on chunk of features known as the We follow through this process, from planning that feature to deploying it. This is one of the beauties of the agile process — we can deliver value fast, frequently, and at the early stages of development. User Story. Automating the process of integrating changes to projects, as we work on features is gaining widespread acceptance especially with web-based projects. But, what about mobile apps? We do not view native mobile apps via browsers? right? Usually, we use emulators or our mobile phones to test our apps. Can we then achieve continuous integration with mobile apps development? The answer is Yes! There are super useful tools for automating integration, and deployment. We need our Git project (hosted on Github, Bitbucket and the likes), and we need a CI server, such as Jenkins, Travis CI or Circle CI. Here, we cover git updates with CircleCI. Getting Started Now that we’ve established the importance of continuous integration, let’s get started: Let’s build a simple Android app named “Resume Manager” with the following very simple user story: As a user, I want to click on “create resume” button to create a resume. We should add some other stories or chores usually known as . Here are some important ones that should be prioritised above the functional user stories. Technical User Stories Set up the app structure Set up the testing framework and structure Run a few mock tests to see if testing works well Set up CircleCI Setting up CircleCI Since our focus for this article is on CircleCI, I will assume that you have set up the app and test structure. We will go ahead to set up our project on CircleCI and run our first Integration (which sometimes fail). Note that each Integration test you run is called a Each build has a number associated with it, which helps identify every progress made in the history of your app, and for every feature delivered, what success at that stage looked like. build. Here’s how you set up your CircleCI Visit circleci.com Authorise CircleCI with your Github account When you sign in, you see a list of your Github accounts or organisations your account is mapped with. Choose an account in order to choose the repository you want to build. In this case the resume-manager repo. Then click on the “Build Project” button. This is what the build screen looks like. Here, my first build was successful. Is that all there is to it? Nope! When you take a look at the tabs below the success check. These tabs: You will notice that there’s the Artifacts tab and the circle.yml. What does this even mean? Usually, you could configure a typical CircleCI to generate some APKs for you such as the debug APK for testing an integration that has just been made before merging to your master/clean branch. How do you configure this? Create a circle.yml file at the root of your project. pull requests circle.yml — what’s that? You would notice that CircleCI ran our first build for us. It did so by automatically inferring settings from our code, this time around Android. However, we really want CircleCI to see more than just our code, we want to reflect the same tests we run on our local systems. When contributors or co-programmers, push code, we want their integration to pass through the same test. We are taking our dependencies into consideration, the version of tools we use, among others. The circle.yml is how we tell CircleCI all of these. Sections of the circle.yml The circle.yml file has different sections fully explained by the CircleCI team. I will examine just a few sections that we need here. here contains general information about the app, this is where we configure which are outputs to be collected for every build such as the APK files. The general section: artifacts general:
    artifacts:
        - /home/ubuntu/resume-manager/app/build/outputs/apk/ Direct the outputs to your project name as configured on your circleci. In this case, the project’s name is . resume-manager is where we specify which virtual machine builds our tests. The machine section: machine:
    environment:
        ANDROID_HOME: /usr/local/android-sdk-linux Next, we specify the dependencies for the Android app in . the dependencies section dependencies:
    override:
        - echo y | android update sdk --no-ui --all --filter tools,platform-tools,build-tools-23.1.1,android-23,extra-google-m2repository,extra-google-google_play_services,extra-android-m2repository Ensure that the dependencies you specify match with the dependencies in your file. Here’s an entire compiled by build.gradle dependencies list JeroenMols Check your dependencies with ./gradlew - ANDROID_HOME=/usr/local/android-sdk-linux ./gradlew dependencies Finally, let’s add one of the most vital sections, . the test section test:
    override:
        - (./gradlew assemble):
            timeout: 360 Your circle.yml should look like this: general:
    artifacts:
        - /home/ubuntu/resume-manager/app/build/outputs/apk/

machine:
    environment:
        ANDROID_HOME: /usr/local/android-sdk-linux

dependencies:
    override:
        - echo y | android update sdk --no-ui --all --filter tools,platform-tools,build-tools-23.1.1,android-23,extra-google-m2repository,extra-google-google_play_services,extra-android-m2repository
        - ANDROID_HOME=/usr/local/android-sdk-linux ./gradlew dependencies

test:
    override:
        - (./gradlew assemble):
            timeout: 360 Build Every feature Completed with CircleCI Now that we’ve added circle.yml to the root of our project, we will proceed to create the user feature, write a unit and instrumentation test. Next, we commit this feature and push to the remote branch. Watch CircleCI run this build. We can also check if the build passes directly from Github. CircleCI is configured by default to only send notifications for failed builds. However, you may choose to change this. For every build successfully completed, we can collect artifacts by clicking on the tab as shown below: Artifacts Conclusion Although CI is really popular with web apps, we can continuously integrate and test changes made as well, when building native mobile apps. This article has shown how this is done with Android using CircleCI. It’s easy to test if new features integrate easily into an existing app. For example, when someone contributes to your open sourced Android project and raises a new pull request, you see the build for this new feature on CircleCI, collect the APKs right there, see the test results, before proceeding to accept or provide feedback on the pull request raised. So now, congratulations! You have just created a pipeline for continuously integrating every piece of code pushed or raised for your android project. pull requests If you liked this, click the💚 below so other people will see this here on Medium. Also, if you have any question or observation, use the comment section to share your thoughts/questions.

Building Android Apps with Agility: Continuous Integration

This blog on the Elpha Community , where the Healthily Match founder, Jacqueline Chan shares her personal journey and her MBA experience to activate her "superpowers" with the community of women working in technology. An edited version is re-posted on the blog of Healthily Match, with questions designed to help employers create positive change and ensure a healthy work environment for their workers. was originally posted here What is your superpower? Are you even aware that you have a superpower? Do you know the ingredients to activate your superpowers? In one of the case competitions I participated in during my MBA at the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management, the entrepreneurs were asked about their superpowers. In an increasingly competitive environment driven by innovation, I’ve found that differentiation and building on the value you offer are indispensable. The question also caused me to self-reflect: how do you develop your superpowers? Are superpowers the result of self-awareness or circumstance, or both? Knowing yourself, the environmental factors and activities that bring out the best in you are important to maintaining mental health and activating your strengths. Having a long-game perspective, exposing yourself to high-growth environments, and having the patience to develop new skills are important if your goals are difficult to achieve (yet worthwhile) and require you to establish pre-conditions for success. Having contrasting experiences helps identify the right environmental variables to see you thrive, develop and activate your superpowers. Throughout my career, I’ve taken on challenges that seem insurmountable at the time due to a lack of resources or a steep learning curve that meant I had to learn new technologies at a rapid pace. Before the MBA, I started my career as a technical marketer, rapidly became a subject matter expert across multiple ad platforms, and I tried to build a minimal viable product on excel to make my work easier. I’ve learnt that agility is crucial in the face of growth and possibility. After moving to Adparlor, one of the first Facebook marketing partners, I contributed significantly from a product perspective during their transition from legacy to a self-serve platform. I experienced incredible success after growing client daily budgets from $1K - $15K for a campaign launch, as a result of successfully hitting the client KPI. Through both of these early experiences, I discovered that I’ve enjoyed collaborating with tech teams to create solutions that can improve my workflow. At OMD, I helped Fortune 500 clients with media planning. I started managing and training junior team members and spent more time presenting to senior client leadership. I leveraged my expertise in search engine marketing to represent OMD at a panel hosted by the (IAB) Interactive Advertising Bureau of Canada to talk about the rise of voice search. When one of my clients was losing market share to the dominant competitor in the field, I was aware that their problem is not marketing-related in nature and required other innovative solutions. This became a trigger for me to get my MBA. Learn to understand and deconstruct both positive and negative or constructive feedback. Don’t let other people who don’t know you define or prescribe adjectives to you based on faulty heuristics. The upside and downside of living in a diverse world are that people grow up differently and have different values. While the dominant cultural work norms and industry values will dictate collective preferences, I’ve discovered that it is really important to figure out what is important to you because ultimately you need an environment that activates your strengths, or “superpowers”. I’ve heard a lot of feedback, both negative and positive. I ultimately believe that feedback is a good thing because it tells you what the other person values (usually in contrast to what you value). I believe that a lot of what self-development boils down to is developing new skill sets to fulfill your objectives, in my case, that was pursuing a startup idea. That means going out of my comfort zone of being a technical expert to test and develop a wide-ranging set of skills: public speaking skills to convey my ideas and vision, persuasion skills to help target clients, understand the value of the product, learning no-code platforms to deliver quick MVPs, and even business development. And the toughest of it all: selling directly to powerful contacts. Eventually, it is also about coming to terms with your strengths and weaknesses so that you can delegate or seek advisors, or gravitate to the right markets and industries. Develop self-reflection skills and learn what motivates you. Because of the nature of my MBA program, I spent more time than usual reflecting on my own and my manager’s leadership styles and skills. A core part of self-development is the ability to find the repertoire and frameworks that are useful for you to develop self-awareness. Self-awareness, just like leadership, is a skill set and requires practice. It is perhaps ironic that we require a variety of environmental conditions and different experiences to help us self-reflect on motivation. How much of your motivation is triggered by external circumstances or intrinsic ones? Perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned through my career is that you could excel at a certain role but it could still drain you. All the awards that you acquire from your job cannot make up for the health sacrifices you make. The principles behind the way you approach life could change. For example, I’ve learnt that even though I excel at presentations, the logistics of traveling to a client's location is enough to exhaust me if I have to do it often. Just because I thrived within a chaotic environment does not mean it is conducive or sustainable to my mental and physical health. For instance, I find that I feel energized when I need to provide evidence and backup for certain claims. The most valuable lessons I’ve learned from my MBA are classes where I work with real-life clients because they helped me gain the most practical insights. When I chose the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, I was particularly interested in the Creative Destruction Lab and its access to founders. It was the sort of place where you want to be to see what startups are doing to change the world. After meeting many startup founders in the Creative Destruction Lab, I’ve learned that developing personal unfair advantages and branding is very important for entrepreneurs to acquire unique insight and set themselves apart if they want to get funding or attract the right talent. In startup language, an unfair advantage refers to a unique selling proposition that your competition cannot copy easily. For an entrepreneur, this means the founder or founding team has unique insight, experience, or solutions that capture the market quicker or faster. I’ve participated in a variety of case competitions related to startups, product management and venture capital to try to understand how to evaluate the likelihood of success. I was inspired by start-ups that take it upon themselves to solve social impact challenges. Case competitions were an effective means of testing knowledge in a practical, solution-driven manner. We won second place in a healthcare management case competition hosted by Eli Lilly in 2017 and our team became the first-ever Rotman finalist out of fifty teams to join the Global Impact Investing case competition in 2020 hosted by the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Working with other students in entirely different industries will help you understand their thought processes. I’ve appreciated the academic experience because it brings my mindset into learning and reflection mode. The courses I’ve taken have provided me with new ways of thinking about problems; topics specifically on business design thinking, leadership styles, technology and its ethical implications, social innovation, and impact investing have broadened my perspective about the various ways you can have an impact on the world. It fundamentally changed the way I approach problems. From an intellectual development perspective, I’ve become deliberate in investigating true root causes, questioning existing measures for success, reframing problems, and readily seeking out research from a variety of fields. For example, are the KPIs (usually from a financial perspective) we’re measuring sufficient and adequate to indicate success? What if the frameworks we’re using are outdated and there are other measures we’re missing? The pre-condition to self-reflection is making the time, also known as taking breaks. I had to undergo surgery when a benign ovarian cyst was discovered and during my recovery, I was forced to take a break from the MBA program when I had a severe allergic reaction. My frustrating experience with the Canadian healthcare system led me to research problems affecting healthcare. After realizing that burnout is prevalent across many careers, I began investigating a mental health startup concept. Since then, I’ve created several minimal viable products and prototypes. I believe in terminating the true root causes for mental health crises: abusive relationships, co-morbid yet undiagnosed physical health conditions, side effects of medications, and subtle discrimination issues at work. What could be the drivers of this problem? If we examine this problem from the perspective of workplace policies, according to , without establishing critical mass, affirmative action can incur negative reactions toward minorities instead of bringing positive change. the research at Rotman While I’ve developed the confidence to launch a software startup, investigating root causes of problems such as persistent workplace burnout and retention problems and applying such insights to create new solutions is the most difficult barrier to overcome. Toxic environments can arise from clashing personalities, incompatible workstyles, limited resources to complete projects, hostility toward minorities, and many other possible factors. Making time to self-reflect is crucial, whether you do this yourself or with a therapist or coach. The objective for each individual is to understand the root causes of burnout. The first-order concern is that people cannot unleash their ‘superpowers’ if they’re burnt out. We're working on today, and we'd appreciate if you can tell us your current experience of navigating toward care solutions, or perhaps you don’t expect or prefer to seek such solutions in the workplace. this trillion-dollar global problem your help In conclusion, superpowers are the result of self-awareness and adaptation to circumstantial challenges. Knowing yourself and the types of activities that bring out the best of you is important to maintaining mental health and activating your strengths. A long-game perspective, persistence and patience to develop new skills are important if your goals are difficult to achieve (yet worthwhile). Contrasting experiences are crucial to developing awareness of environmental variables that activate your “superpowers”. Understanding and deconstructing positive and negative (or constructive) feedback is great for gaining self-awareness of your values in contrast to others’ values. Self-reflection is a habit and a skill that takes practice. Depending on your self-reflection skills and life experience, you may or may not find the MBA to be one of the best options for you to improve or discover new ways to look at problems, see new possibilities, and find or create the environmental variables that unleash your “superpowers”. Are you looking for co-founders or would like to have a brainstorming session on a new idea to solve a known problem? What do you consider to be your “superpowers”? Alternatively, what type of “superpowers” do you want to develop? Have you found your therapy or coaching sessions to be helpful towards understanding yourself better and actualizing your goals? What are the issues (whether they are from the workplace or family) you’ve addressed successfully with your therapist that you believe could’ve been proactively prevented if you or others have developed skills that guarantee productive and positive outcomes? Tell us your experience of how you’re navigating towards wellness solutions today. here.

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