As we’ve mentioned in our description of the Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations Master Workshop:

• Why means understanding the values and the culture
• How drives the systems and structures of the organization
• What deals with the process, or behaviors of people and teams

Starting with why is the first step to affecting real and sustainable organizational change. In his book, Simon Sinek describes how leaders and organizations have failed in demonstrating the vision of their company, not only to their customers, but to their employees as well. This is the primary reason we start all of our client engagements with a cultural assessment and an awareness of how the organizational values align with agile values and what leadership can do to bridge the gap

Most organizations seeking to be more agile start with their process, because this is the easiest area to see and impact. However, as soon as they implement a change to their processes, they run into organizational impediments - often within the structures and culture of the organization. Starting with why and aligning the structures of the organization to the goals of agility, provides an infrastructure for an agile process to succeed.

By studying influential leaders around the world, Sinek describes that they each think, act, and communicate in exactly the same way and this becomes a framework on which organizations can be changed, movements can be lead, and people can be inspired. On the other hand, if neither the customers nor the employees understand the essence of the company and why they are doing what they do, it’s simply a failed model all around and unfortunately too many organizations, too many movements, and too many groups are failing by getting the why right.

In our Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations Master Workshop, we’ll dive into the unseen norms and values of your company to see why leaders act the way they do and create awareness to enable agile growth instead.

In this book, Steve Denning warns leaders that traditional management styles have not been able to resolve fundamental business problems or adapt to the way business is done in the 21st century. The balance of power has essentially shifted from the sales force and landed squarely on the customer/consumer. In a knowledge economy, where everyone has the ability create, evaluate, and trade knowledge, non agile businesses don’t stand a chance. 

To counter the problem, Denning describes seven inter-locking principles of continuous innovation, which is essential to a thriving business today. These principles comprise the new guiding force for an entire organization and they are 100% focused on empowering your teams and delighting your customers. When put together, the principles comprise a new radical model for management.

To delight their customers, organizations must shift their focus from value to values, meaning a shift from a single-minded profit focus to generating a continuous stream of new, additional values for the customer. This means an entirely different role for organization managers and leaders: from the controller of people to the enablers of self-organizing teams, from a hierarchical bureaucracy to dynamic, client-driven response activities, and from command-and-control styles to peer-to-peer communication - exactly the kind of learning we’re currently promoting with our Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations Master Workshop. 

In this book, you will find many examples of companies who understand the changes that are necessary and many of those were guided by Trail Ridge Consulting.

As many of you know, my work for the past decade has focused entirely on client success through organizational and leadership agility, and the leadership and coaching competencies required to drive it. Today, I’m excited to introduce a new master workshop which brings these two areas in focus for leaders and coaches. But first, let me tell you a little about how it developed.

How the idea got started

Back in 2007, Mike Cohn, the author of Succeeding with Agile, asked me to lead a new effort to develop a program designed to recognize the efforts of those who were making a difference through deeper client engagements, essentially those who were ‘transforming the world of work.’

Working with Roger Brown, and a handful of our peers, we researched and evaluated the critical success factors that lead clients to success with agility. Through this effort, we combined success criteria across different dimensions and created a superset “high-bar” as the criteria for defining the Scrum Alliance Certified Scrum Coaching (CSC) Program – a bar set so high that some of us on the formation committee did not meet it.

For the past four years, we have applied this criteria to over 120 coaches across the globe. While we remain committed to the belief that the evaluation criteria and the subsequent high-bar are set at an appropriate level, we are recognizing that many effective agile coaches are operating below that bar. 

How the program evolved

Lyssa Adkin’s has emerged as a leading voice in the agile coaching world with her recent book, Coaching Agile Teams. Her work has recognized many of the agile coaching competencies in the “doing” and “being” of an agile coach involve mentoring, facilitating, problem-solving, and conflict navigating as necessary competencies. These are necessary competencies of an agile coach, and part of our critieria in evaluating CSC candidates. In our research, however, these competencies are not sufficient to drive client success – additional competencies are required.

Inspiring effective organizational change requires an intimate awareness of and engagement with the culture, systems, and leadership within an organization – in essence, it requires a deeper knowledge of the organizational ecosystem and patterns to enact an organizational transformation. Thus, the CSC program was designed to evaluate a coach’s awareness of, and experience with, these dimensions.

The Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations Master Workshop evolved out of our experiences incorporating these organizational dimensions and through our evaluation of the multitude of coaches engaged in organizational change around the globe.

How the program is structured

Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations focuses on the coach as leader - and leader as coach - in engaging the leadership, system, and cultural layers of an organization. It leverages numerous models in each dimension and provides real corporate case studies to show how each has been applied in transition and growth of agility.

• Learn more about the Leading/Coaching Agile Organizations Workshop
• Register for a Public Workshop 

As many of you already know, I am the program lead for the Certified Scrum Coaching (CSC) Program with the Scrum Alliance. As the program lead, it is my responsibility to facilitate the review process, review teams, and review application. While a relatively new program founded in 2007, our numbers are growing each year with now almost 50 Certified Coaches. However, we believe our potential and need in the industry is 10x that number. This article provides some understanding of the CSC Program and guidance for those who wish to apply.

As one of the founders of the program, I am passionate about clients being successful with Scrum. It is my experience that success with Scrum requires education and coaching. Most difficulties in Scrum don't arise from learning the Scrum framework, rather they arise in applying the framework on an existing organizational structure and culture. This requires hands-on experienced guidance, and not just at the team-level, but at the leadership and organizational-level.

I have just updated the slides from my talk at Agile 2011 on The Culture of Agility. View it as a presentation.

I am excited to introduce a new opportunity to change the world of work! I am working with the Scrum Alliance and other Scrum Coaches to create a new approach in collaborating with coaching peers to solve complex organizational and coaching challenges - A Scrum Coaching Retreat. December 7-9, 2011 we are going to be piloting a new retreat approach using Scrum as our principle framework.

There are few people in our Scrum Community who know personally the power of video games to engage people, and even create addictions to them. There are even some who have applied Scrum to creating those addictive online video games.

This article is not about applying Scrum to gaming applications; rather, it is about the similarities Scrum has to the gaming world in what makes them so addicting. Video gaming is one of the largest growing markets in the world at $50B this year and is on target to be three times the music industry by 2014. This year alone, there was $8B spent on virtual goods in online gaming systems - a true market indeed.

We can learn a tremendous amount from the viral and exponential growth of the video gaming industry. What makes these video games so interesting, engaging and addicting; and what can we learn about them in making our organizations more interesting, engaging, and even addicting?

Total Attorney's, a Trail Ridge client, recently re-imagined their Scrum Task Board for their philanthropic Total Impact House. Check out the video and read their story below...

New Impact House SCRUM Board from Total Attorneys on Vimeo.

Once again VersionOne has provided an excellent insight into the global state of agility with over 2,500 responses with a truly global reach of respondents from 88 countries. Here is a copy of the 4th Annual State of Agility Survey 2009. Overall, the most striking results from the survey were the broadness and distribution of adoption across varying company sizes, projects and numbers of teams. There does not appear to be a distinction any more regarding agile is for small companies/projects/teams - it is being effectively implemented across the board.

Some of the key datapoints in the survey:

• Scrum and Scrum/XP hybrid increased adoption to 74% of the responses
• Most important reason for adopting agile - time to market
• Most important benefit in adopting agile - managing changing priorities
• Largest barrier to adoption - management
• Greatest concern with adoption - lack of upfront planning
• Biggest cause of failure in agile - lack of experience (see chart above)

We would appreciate any feedback you have.

To all local Colorado agile practitioners and colleagues, CU Boulder is sponsoring a talk by Lee Devin and Robert Austin, authors of "Artful Making". If you haven't read this book, I highly recommend it as a non-techie understanding of teamwork and agility. If you have, but have not had the pleasure of hearing them speak - you will not be disappointed. I have provided the details below...

The University of Colorado at Boulder

Here is a Linked In Event Link... http://events.linkedin.com/Free-Presentation-Theatre-Rehearsal/pub/159767

Trail Ridge Consulting is introducing a new service: The Leadership Agility 360™ Assessment. 

Leadership agility is now considered by many to be the “master competency” needed to make wise decisions and take effective action amid complex and rapidly changing conditions. The Leadership Agility 360™, developed in partnership with ChangeWise and Cambria Consulting, is the first extensively researched online feedback tool to assess a manager’s level of leadership agility.

Based on the award-winning book, Leadership Agility, by ChangeWise principals Bill Joiner and Steven Josephs, The Leadership Agility 360 evaluates a manager’s level of agility in leading organizational change, improving team performance, and engaging in productive business conversations. Their in-depth research has shown that, in today’s turbulent economy, increased agility is the key to sustained effectiveness in all three of these key leadership arenas.

Pete Behrens is a Certified Leadership Agility 360 Coach. 

Read more about the program or download a brochure.

August 2009, Ed Scanlan, CEO of Total Attorneys

What is culture? One of our clients - Total Attorneys CEO Ed Scanlan doesn't bother defining it. And yet, he calls culture "the bedrock" of his business. Whatever it is, it's working; seven years after its founding, Total Attorneys
will crack $30 million in revenue. Take a close look at the video - see Scrum as a core element of his high-performing team culture.

Click the picture or play button to watch the video...

Graebel (a Trail Ridge client) has started an Enterprise Agile IT Blog discussing their agile transition, approach, architecture, development practices and more. Multiple roles within their organization are contributing to the blog which keeps the content diverse and fresh. I encourage you to check out their postings and set up an RSS link.

http://enterpriseagile.wordpress.com/

Ants were once thought to be specialists - being born with DNA set up for a specific chore in the ant colony. Recently, however, researchers have discovered that ants are actually generalists and can perform any task in the colony. However, they typically perform one task at a time to increase efficiency through less task switching.

"A rainbow-hued experiment from the University of Arizona proves that ants aren’t the one-career workers we thought they were. Here, rock ants dedicate all their energy to caring for their limbless larvae. Scientists once believed this type of job specialization was hardwired into each ant—that is, individual ants were capable of doing only one job—and specialization was the key to their efficiency. Having certain individuals serve exclusively as nurses, nest builders or foragers earned ant colonies the title “superorganism.” But biologist Anna Dornhaus color-coded 1,200 ants using paint to identify individuals and set them on various tasks. “It turns out,” she says, “each individual ant seems to be equally good at every job.” Instead, colonies may increase efficiency by saving in “switching costs,” the time it takes a worker to physically move from one task to another." - from popsci.com

Working on a Scrum team we often discuss the benefits and tradeoffs of generalization vs. specialization. Scrum teams that have versatile members - those that are deep in some areas, but are flexible and capable to assist other areas less aligned with their specialty are more productive than teams of specialists.

The other benefit of Scrum is the reduction of task switching through more direct focus of the entire team within a Sprint. The costs of task switching have been well documented, but this provides yet another case of nature avoiding the practice.

Thanks to Stacia Broderick for identifying this article.

• Death by Scrum Meeting on Tuesday @ 11AM
• Agile Leadership on Wednesday @ 4PM

While conferences in general have been down in attendance this year due to the economy, this is still the most comprehensive agile conferences available and a must see for any new or old agile practitioners.

I have been presenting the Death by Scrum Meeting session in a number of settings this year and one thing sticks out - companies have a difficult time with Scrum meetings. Come find out some of the principles behind Scrum and some awesome facilitation techniques to achieve effective and efficient Scrum meetings at the same time improving your team ownership, commitment, accountability and discipline - sounds too good to be true.

4th Annual State of Agile Development Survey - August 2009 by VersionOne

VersionOne has launched the 4th Annual State of Agile Survey and would love your help to get the word out. Last year they had over 3,000 respondents from over 80 countries and want to blow those numbers out of the water this year. Below are links you can post on your website, blog, Twitter, newsletters, email, tattoo on your forehead…you get the picture.

And while you're at it, don't forget to take the survey yourself!

Survey Link: http://surveys.versionone.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=1299357&ext_ref=420
Shortened URL: http://bit.ly/AgileSurvey

Henrick Kniberg does a good job in presenting the differences between Kanban vs Scrum in this presentation at Deep Lean in Stockholm earlier this year.

Key similarities - both are empirical processes, have few ceremonies, limit work in process.

Key differences - Scrum prescribes team roles and a sprint structure.

While it is nice to know the differences, it is better to know why they are different and how they get applied in organizations - here is what I see...

I read this comic last week and found it to be quite representative of what I see in most functional organizations.

While a functional organization reduces complexity to work on only a part of your pipeline, it sure does provide ample opportunities for skirting responsibility, blaming others and generally building trust voids within the organization.

One of the first, and often initially most skeptical, changes that I put in place within an organization is the concept of cross-functional team. But beyond that, a team that is responsible for as much of the pipeline as possible. 

Take for example a new company I provided some initial training and coaching for... They were relatively small with four teams:

1. Search
2. Reporting
3. Front End
4. Other

 Seams harmless. However, their product managers (soon to become product owners) were responsible for only two functions (simplified):

1. supply-side - those that produced content for their business
2. demand-side - those that consumed content from their business

Thus, their product managers were coordinating across four teams to get their work done. Teams had a number of dependencies they needed to manage. This all required project management to coordinate all of the interrelated communication lines.

My recommendation was simple - create supply-side and demand-side teams, align them with the product owners and give them responsibility over the pipeline. Well, after much skepticism, vocal "buts", and much discussion, the organization has decided to restructure around this premise. Many of the "buts" are real and will require some changes to the way people work on a team and the technology they work on at times. This is not easy to do, but once teams make this transition - it is amazing to see the teamwork evolve!

Now, this is a relatively simple example, but serves to underscore the fundamental problem - and that problem gets worse the larger the organization is. Yet, it is this very same change that has made larger case studies like Salesforce.com, JDA Software and others successful.