Organizations are living organisms – people inside are connected by an established culture and they all move the organization together. Trying to influence this established culture is a difficult undertaking. In the last couple of years, I have been working in organizations, each being at different level of becoming agile and adopting Agile mindset:
- such, implementing successfully Agile mindset & practices;
- such, being successful in being agile until another culture interferes;
- such, using waterfall model and believing the world is almost static and changes slowly.
In this post I have collected some patterns I have seen (both from my own experience and from others) that cause troubles to organization trying to become agile. I don’t claim this is an exhaustive list, but rather want to share what I have seen most often happen in such organizations. Here I assume the management has bought the idea of implementing Agile practices and work in that direction, because if there is no support, all initiatives would die early. You are very welcome to share your experience in the comments below; I will be happy to see that. Continue Reading…
My work as a software architect and developer has brought me a lot of challenges and I am constantly trying to improve the way I work. One of my personal “rules” is regularly to try something different from what I usually do at the workplace. This takes me out of my comfort zone and provides fruitful insights in other areas. That’s how almost an year ago I started doing improv. Improv comes from improvisation and the simple idea behind it is that actors create a story on the stage on the fly, i.e. nothing is prepared in advance. They typically take a single word from the audience to inspire them and then, depending on the chosen format, the actors should coordinate themselves on the stage and fascinate the people in the audience. In this post I have gathered 5 principles used in improv, one can also apply to Agile.