Disciplined Agile: Maximizing Business Agility by “Choosing your WoW”
We like to say that agile teams own their own process by choosing their way of working, their “WoW.” This of course is easier said than done because there are several aspects to WoW. First, our team needs to know how to choose the appropriate lifecycle for the situation that we face. Should we take a Scrum-based approach, a lean/Kanban-based approach, a continuous delivery approach, or an exploratory/lean startup approach? Second, what practices should the team adopt? How do they fit together? When should we apply them? Third, what artifacts should the team create? When should they be created? To what level of detail? Finally, how do we evolve our WoW as we experiment and learn?
There are several strategies that we could choose to follow when we tailor and evolve our WoW. A common approach is to adopt a prescriptive method or framework such as Scrum or SAFe and follow it, but our team will soon find itself in “method prison” with no guidance for how to improve from there. A second approach is to bootstrap our WoW, to figure it out on our own. This works, but it is a very slow and expensive strategy in practice. A third strategy is to hire an agile coach, but sadly in practice the majority of coaches seem to be like professors who are only a chapter or two ahead of their students. Or we could take a more disciplined, streamlined approach and leverage the experiences of the thousands of teams who have already struggled through the very issues that our team currently faces. This is something we call Guided Continuous Improvement (GCI), which is effectively a Kaizen loop on steroids.
In this talk, Mark explains the value of the Disciplined Agile toolkit, and how to use it in practice with GCI.
Presenter: Mark Lines (https://www.linkedin.com/in/marklines/)
Team Resilience – Creating the next edge in project delivery
In recent years resilience has become increasingly important across all industry sectors. There are higher workloads, fewer resources, and changing demands as organizations attempt to adapt to global competitive markets and a rapidly changing technological, political, social, and climatic environment. Many of the changes we have seen in recent years have been transformational with major implications for job roles. When these pressures are combined with the increasing complexity and ‘busyness’ of everyday life, the desired responses move beyond the management of stress to a need for resilience.
The new era of work makes resilience a critical attribute.
While resilience is now being recognized as an important underpinning of long-term worker health and performance, most focus to date has been at the individual level, with less attention paid to the impact of the groups in which people work. This is despite the fact that most people work in a team, or in multiple teams.
Resilient teams are robust enough to manage their role effectively yet agile enough to both respond to, and be the leaders in, change. For performance to be sustained over the longer-term, it means that team challenges need to be managed while preserving, not sacrificing, employee wellbeing. Resilience enables sustainable performance.
A number of strategies can be put into place to foster the resilience of teams. Join to learn about a model for team resilience that you can use to support your project teams.
We look forward to seeing you at the event.
Silvia de Ridder is Managing Director of Unconscious Potential. She describes herself as an engineer of human excellence. Silvia works with organizations in the areas of leadership, people, and team development. In addition, she has a background in engineering and program/project management. Silvia brings a level of knowledge to the development of engineers, program/project managers, and technical personnel to develop business and behavioral skills. Silvia has partnered with PMI for the past 10 plus years delivering professional development programs.
PMI Sydney's Transformation Series continues in August '18 with a discussion on how and why people sometimes need to go through a personal transformation. A great way to relate this is through Joseph Campbell's "the Hero's Journey"
James Clark is a personal transformation coach and is our next speaker at PMI Sydney's Breakfast event.
James will speak on the topic of personal transformation and what it relates to. He will cover a series of steps of personal transformation, and how they relate to ourselves, and our future selves.
Join us for breakfast, to know more about The 12 Stages of The Hero's Journey
Time: 7:00AM (Networking); 7:30AM to 8:30AM (Event followed by networking)
Date: Wednesday 08th August 2018
Location: Castlereagh Boutique Hotel, 169 Castlereagh St, Sydney NSW 2000
Professional Development Units (PDU): 1 PDU can be claimed for attending this event
Cost: Free for PMI Sydney Chapter Members (log in first), $20 for Guests