in this blog post, John Piekos explains how the ScrumMaster and Product Owner roles in Scrum are much more demanding than the Project and Product Manager roles of traditional project approaches. With frequent “potentially shippable product increments”, he believes that full-time effort is required from all members in order to be successful.

The way traditional businesses approach the management and organization of creative, intellectual workers is wrong. By throwing away everything that blocks productivity (meetings, deadlines, managers, titles, strict vacation policies, etc) and treating your employees as the responsible adults that they are, huge amounts of potential can be unlocked and employee happiness and retention can be at unprecedented highs.

A CEO discusses three barriers that prevent Agile adoption: the management team, the technical team and the CEO himself.

This blog post discusses the issue of helping middle managers finding a new role in an organization that adopt agile approaches.

Not all companies seeking Agile team members are alike. Some have misguided ideas about what it means to be Agile. Others are doing their own particular “variation” of Agile that feels decidedly non-Agile to experienced practitioners. This article helps you to find an Agile employer.

The skills needed to be hyper-productive in an agile project differ from those required by a traditional one. This article identifies behavioral and technical skills required to give a Scrum team that edge.

It’s important for people to believe that openness given can lead to openness received. This openness must extend to admitting mistakes when necessary. [...] When people admit to mistakes, others in a group are more apt to do so as well. It’s always better to know about mistakes earlier than later. Being open about them has the added benefit of giving critics less ammunition.

The Core Protocols are our ‘best practices’ for people, teams of people and organizations that want to get great results – all the time. They are ‘Core’ because they are foundational – they can be used by all teams, anywhere, even if you already have organizational patterns and best practices of your own. They are ‘Protocols’ because they name and prescribe ways that people can interact (behavior), predictably, …

As an agile coach, you want to build trust with the people on the team you are coaching. You also want to improve trust between individuals on the team (which is hard to do if the team doesn’t trust you yet). This post shares Rachel Davies thinking on how you can help encourage trust to grow in different situations.

So much of what is written about leadership is hogwash. There’s no recipe to follow. It starts with you and a belief in yourself. A belief in new possibilities. A belief in your abilities to make changes in the world, and an appreciation that you can’t do it all on your own: Leadership is a State of Mind