During an introductory Agile training at a local government we discovered a desire to start Agile ways of working. I was amazed at first by the current cautious approach of decision making and value delivery at the government: i.e. writing a vision document, then a planning documentation, etc. before talking with customers or creating anything real. We turned amazement to mutual opportunity.   Together with the participants we formulated three problem areas and started working on... Learn more

A large international insurance company works hard to transform its operations with Agile ways of working. Blinkane Consulting and Gladwell Academy help drive this transformation.     Derived from the SAFe framework, the company deployed several Agile Release Trains (ARTs): a team of teams mounting to over one hundred people collaborating to deliver value to their customers. On 12 September 2017, an experienced ART held its 3-month Inspect and Adapt meeting. The energy from... Learn more

Are you a product owner or do you want to learn more about this role? The Product Owner training of Gladwell Academy gives you great insights into the tasks and responsibilities of product owners, and it addresses common issues which you as a product owner have to deal with in practice.     As a product owner you fulfill a specific and important role in the organization. You are the value optimizer, the product backlog owner and responsible for prioritizing all needs. You are... Learn more

Some time ago, when I did mostly freelance training and consulting work, I wished to be proud of a visible product, something to touch. With some other city-folk we started to grow a community around healthy food, directly from the biological farmers surrounding our city. Each with our own motivation for joining we connected city-people throughout class and culture. Our first successes made us proud, they triggered more action. Yet, when we grew in people and turnover, there were different... Learn more

This event is organized for and by Release Train Engineers. We are looking for RTE’s or Chief Scrum Masters who are willing to invest their time and are looking forward to share their experiences with this role. Do you want to join us at Amsterdam Arena and be part of a professional RTE-platform? Visit... Learn more

So here they are, the so-called ‘self-managing’ teams, steered by their Scrum Master (SM) and/or Product Owner (PO). ‘A pity’, some team members call it; ‘too much for my taste’, says an extremely competent freelancer before he decides to leave the team. You can almost see the other members think: ‘this so-called self-management is a nuisance, probably adhering to the new Agile way of working’. And the Scrum Master and Product Owner? They too do not feel comfortable with their... Learn more

With a series of articles I’m offering practical guidance to unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers. According to motivational theory, carrot and stick won’t bring more success. Yes, we need enough payment to get money off the table but more than that, knowledge workers need some space to decide for themselves -autonomy, a path of professional growth – mastery, and clarity about their added value to the whole –purpose. Let’s continue. #1: Move authority to where the... Learn more

With a series of articles I’m offering practical guidance to unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers. According to motivational theory, carrot and stick won’t bring more success. Yes, we need enough payment to get money off the table but furthermore, knowledge workers need some space to decide for themselves -autonomy, a path of professional growth –mastery, and clarity about their added value to the whole –purpose. Let’s start at the... Learn more

Increasingly, large corporations enjoy the benefits of start-ups while not being hampered by their impediments. Agile ways of working foster a ‘can do’ mentality of self-organizing co-located teams. Yet, as Agile teams turn projects into success, corporations like to scale the benefits, which in turn leads to a new set of challenges and constraints. Only leaders can change the system, and in scaling Agile the system in place needs transformation. Specifically, changes are required in the... Learn more

This conference took place at KBC Bank in Brussels on Thursday, February 23d. The speakers invariably addressed the social cooperative aspect of Enterprise Agility elaborating on practical usage of Sociocracy and multiple ways of looking at organizing and the organization. We focussed attention on three talks, namely: Organisational development by Jaap Peters, Sociocracy 3.0 by James Priest, and Complexitools by Niels Pflaeging. Together they form a train of thought on what the... Learn more