Quick Guidance

An Agile transformation is the deepest change your organization will ever undergo. Unfortunately, executives are often presented with biased, partial, or false information about it. If your senior leaders want candid, realistic, and unbiased responses to their questions and concerns, look no further.

In this 2-3 hour session, we’ll establish a shared, accurate understanding of the Agile paradigm; express the needs, expectations, pitfalls, and implications of an Agile transformation; and discuss workable strategies and tactics for leading the change.

Important: We are not affiliated with any large consulting group or certification scheme, so when we say unbiased, we mean unbiased.

If you’d like to be Agile with your next major undertaking but the situation is complicated, using a popular framework or cobbling together “best practices” may not be a good idea. Instead, you need to customize Agile, from first principles, to your context.

We’ll work with the key players on alignment around values, constraints, and assumptions. We’ll guide the design of a suitable workflow, effective team structure, and good practices. And we’ll help you facilitate a successful kick-off to make all of that real.

Read a case study of doing this at one of Canada’s largest banks.

If you’d like to take your Agile implementation to the next level or to get it unstuck, we’ll help you figure out the best way forward. Spoiler alert: it’s almost never a matter of process, tools, or adherence to a framework.

We’ll assess the entire ecosystem, examining such aspects as culture, leadership approaches, management practices, team dynamics and ways of working, agility across the value stream, IT-business interactions, technical agility, and safety. Instead of looking for compliance with specific processes — which a tool could tell you — we analyze how your human system makes Agile-minded choices in its unique context, and uncover the root causes of the gaps. Ending with a deep conversational review (and optionally with a written report), we’ll recommend a practical roadmap and high-value actions toward your desired goal, identify challenges, and discuss mitigation strategies. We only need a few days and we don’t tie up anyone’s time in long meetings. Note: this is step one in our Contextual Agile system.

“We asked Gil to help us figure out how our talented, passionate team could become a cohesive unit. He only spent two days with us, but people were blown away by how spot-on his observations were, and how he made people very comfortable discussing even the most uncomfortable topics. Using his findings and recommendations, we are now working collaboratively on putting together a roadmap to becoming a better, more effective Agile team. This engagement was well worth the investment!” — Andrei Cornienco, VP Software Engineering & Infrastructure, Pethealth

Interested? Ask Gil Broza for a sample of an assessment’s review meeting.

Agile teams and organizations benefit from collaboration, but not only on day-to-day work. Bring your people’s wisdom to bear on critical junctures, such as drawing lessons from recent events, roadmapping a new initiative, or upgrading your Agile implementation. The key here is to hold plenary events that get everyone — not just management — to do the thinking, collaborating, and deciding. Such events are rarely longer than a day, and while they involve a large number of people, are well worth the investment if done effectively and efficiently: beyond achieving their official outcome, they greatly advance the Agile culture.

We will collaborate with you on planning a successful workshop: purpose, agenda, invitation, deliverables, process, etc. And if you prefer, we will facilitate it for you (such events must be led by experienced facilitators.)

Are you leading a non-software group, and finding the promise of Agile appealing? Not sure what’s a good way to adopt it?

While Agile is applicable and beneficial to many pursuits outside of software development/IT, its implementation may look nothing like it often does there. In fact, popular mechanics (such as sprints and user stories) and frameworks (such as Scrum) may not be suitable for you. You need an implementation that works in your specific context.

Call on us, and we’ll take your group through the right conversations, guide and advise at critical junctures, and help you design a practical implementation that sticks.