You have to change in a fast moving environment! “A system must be managed. It will not manage itself.” W. Edwards Deming “The performance of a system depends more on how its parts interact than on how they perform taken separately.” Russell Ackoff When Agile first began to gain traction, it felt different. Project managers and CTOs could see the value quickly. Short feedback cycles produced usable results sooner. Teams that were trusted to make local decisions moved faster a

SAFe makes risk visible! “When responsibility is unclear, authority does not disappear. It becomes invisible.” Russell L. Ackoff “A system must be managed. It will not manage itself.” W. Edwards Deming Many experienced Agile professionals do not feel undervalued because they lack skill. They feel that way because the systems they work within often fail to make their impact visible. In many Agile environments, practitioners are responsible for moving work forward, resolving

When enthusiasm outruns systems thinking. “A system must be managed. It will not manage itself.”  W. Edwards Deming “Optimization of parts does not optimize the whole.”  Russell Ackoff In an earlier post, I argued that iterative and incremental  are not project life cycles. They are execution patterns. I covered that distinction in detail there, so I will focus here on why it matters once organizations try to scale. If you are interested in that article, it is here:...

If you’ve seen this moment, you already know why Agile stalls. “The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good people to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it. ”Theodore Roosevelt “You cannot manage knowledge workers the way you managed factory workers. ”Peter Drucker I’ve seen it over and over again. Managers cannot let Scrum be Scrum. They have to meddle. They impose reporting where none is needed.