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Specialized support

Move the Agile needle with expert guidance

Even if your Agile journey is largely a “do it yourself” endeavour, several points along the way may call for expertise that you don’t have in-house.

You may be looking for someone who is easy to work with, impartial, and attuned to your specific circumstances. If that sounds appealing to you, engage Gil Broza to provide one of the following services.

Get your senior leadership on board

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 creating organizational agility; 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.

Design a custom Agile implementation

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” is not a good idea. Instead, what works is to customize Agile to your context, from first principles.

We’ll work with the key players on values alignment, constraints, and assumptions. We’ll guide the design of a suitable workflow, effective team structure, and promising practices. And we’ll help you facilitate a successful kick-off to start the new way of working with high energy and clarity.

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

Determine your best next step with Agile

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. We only need a few days for this and we don’t tie up anyone’s time in long meetings. We’ll recommend a practical roadmap and high-value actions toward your desired goal, identify challenges, and discuss mitigation strategies. In the following weeks, we’ll continue the conversations to help you prepare your plan of action. Note: this is “Map the Journey”, step one in our Right-Fit Agile approach.

“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.

Facilitate a large collaborative event

Agile teams and organizations benefit from collaboration, but not only on day-to-day work. Bring your people’s wisdom to bear at 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.)

“As the organizer of a three-day event, one of the best decisions I made was to have Gil facilitate a substantial portion of it and coach me through the rest of it. Thank you for helping us build the foundation for reaching our next level, and making it easier to continue this interaction throughout the year even if it is over Zoom.” — Rod Recker, Director at Twinmotion (an Epic company)

Start Agile in a non-software team

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 there may look quite different. 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.

For a small investment of time, we’ll take your team through the right conversations, guide and advise at critical junctures, and help you design a practical, effective and sustainable implementation.

(Examples of where we’ve done this: architectural design, Plastics R&D, TV show selection and development, a marketing team, a finance group, talent acquisition)

Gil Broza’s Books

IMPROVING VALUE DELIVERY

Pragmatic, people-first, expert support for your successful Agile journey
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TRAINING

Inspiring experiences that change mindset, develop skills, and catalyze action
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SPECIALIZED SUPPORT

Expert help for special Agile-related needs
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PUBLIC COURSES

Training opportunities (online and in-person) with Gil Broza
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