Marc Lustig

Did you hear them say: "Agile teams cannot keep deadlines"? It's a common misunderstanding of agile methods. In fact, agile methods are better at keeping deadlines than traditional methods! 👇 This article explains how to deliver on time with agile methods https://lnkd.in/ehnGycDU #agile #deadline

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Release Notes Updated Chapter: “Beyond Kaizen to Kaikaku: Two Patterns That Transform Good Scrum to Great” https://lnkd.in/eASMHWPg Overview The latest update to First Principles in Scrum: Implementing Scrum and Agile Practices introduces a transformative chapter focusing on two core patterns, the “Happiness Pattern” and “Scrumming the Scrum.” These patterns enable teams to elevate their Scrum practices from incremental improvements (Kaizen) to radical transformation (Kaikaku), driving significant productivity and morale enhancements. Key Enhancements 1. Happiness Pattern Introduction: • Purpose: Establishes a precise tool for identifying high-impact impediments through happiness metrics. • Method: Prompts team members to rate their happiness on role and organizational level, with a focus on identifying actionable changes for the upcoming sprint. • Outcome: Empowers teams to convert broad dissatisfaction into specific improvements, driving iterative yet impactful changes. 2. Scrumming the Scrum: • Description: A systematic approach to remove the most significant impediments identified through the Happiness Pattern. • Implementation: Ensures that high-priority impediments are tackled at the start of each sprint, creating a streamlined focus on improvement before other sprint tasks. • Impact: The combination of these two patterns results in a rapid, compounding performance improvement through continuous focus and feedback loops. 3. Case Studies on Rapid Transformation: • Scrum Inc.: Highlights how one-week sprint cycles, happiness tracking, and empowerment led to a 500% performance boost and rapid resolution of major impediments. • Microsoft: Demonstrates adaptation to Scrum in a large organizational setup using temporary solutions for immediate action. • Toyota: Details the shift from large team sizes to smaller, empowered Scrum teams, achieving a full project turnaround in six months. 4. Key Takeaways for Agile Leaders: • Pattern Precision: Emphasizes the importance of exact pattern implementation, advocating for one-week sprints and iterative action on impediments. • Kaikaku Mindset: Encourages leaders to foster a culture of continual transformation, aiming for revolutionary changes that drive productivity and team satisfaction. • Transformative Leadership: Urges leaders to inspire teams by sharing a vision for improvement, supporting self-organization, and embracing bold actions. 5. Common Pitfalls & Solutions: • Addresses common errors such as defaulting to two-week sprints, treating happiness as a lagging metric, and implementing multiple improvement stories per sprint. • Provides guidance on focusing on one high-leverage improvement per sprint and reinforcing the synergy between Happiness and Scrumming the Scrum patterns.

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Did you know: Employees do not always go for the best solution? …and that‘s not because they‘d be stupid, lazy or mean, but it‘s because of company culture. How you can change this is what I describe in this article in the Agile Compass: https://lnkd.in/e-_jvin3 #agile #productivity #leadership

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Why listen to podcasts and contribute to such a medium? For me it was a very good possibility to reflect together with Temitope Awere some months ago. The recording was published yesterday and of course: I see the world already (a little bit) different because I learned so many new things and gained more experience by working with so many interesting people especially in the banking & insurance domain in the last couple of months ☀️ #evolutionarychange #personaldevelopment #organizationaldevelopment https://lnkd.in/enTMrbrJ About the podcast: “In this episode of the Agile Matrix Podcast, we’re joined by Christoph Dibbern, an Accredited Kanban Consultant, Flight Levels Coach, and Management 3.0 Facilitator. Christoph brings a wealth of experience from his roles, including his work as a lecturer together with Ronny Kant at the University of Hamburg 2024 (and also 2025), to share valuable insights on mastering agility at scale. Tune in as Christoph takes us on a journey through some insights of approaches like Enterprise Kanban, exploring how to align teams, streamline processes, and create a culture of continuous improvement across your organization. He also delves into the Flight Levels approach, offering a fresh perspective on connecting strategy to execution and managing work effectively at every level. In this episode, you’ll learn some insights about: • The key principles and benefits of Kanban and how to implement it effectively • How Flight Levels can help bridge the gap between strategy and operational work • Practical tips for Agile leaders and practitioners to foster collaboration and drive success across teams“ Thanks a lot Temitope Awere, crossnative and Ronny Kant for having the possibility to speak about and to work in the context of evolutionary change initiatives around the globe! #customerfocus #transparency #workflow #agreement #respect #collaboration #understanding #leadership #creativity #balance #research #continuouslearning

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“You can’t keep a deadline with agile” - true or not? The truth is: agile methods are much better at keeping deadlines or any other constraints. What it takes is 👉 knowing what you want and 👉 learning how to apply agile methods I wrote about how to keep deadlines with agile methods in the Agile Compass: https://lnkd.in/ehnGycDU #agile #projectmanagement #deadlines

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💫 ROAM 💫 Change practitioners – Agile or otherwise – are risk managers. By action if not by job title. Risk Management isn’t in the Agile mainstream and when attempted formally in traditional project management falls somewhere between lip service and bureaucracy. Let’s make Risk Management in Change fun – with ROAM and Visual Agile Coaching. 👉 What is it? ROAM is an acronym for Resolve, Own, Accept, and Mitigate – a menu for Risk Management. ➡ Resolved Risks: No threat (at this time) = no issue, no further action is required. ➡ Owned Risks: “I’ve got this!” = I’m the best owner for the risk (and I will resolve, accept mitigate accordingly) ➡ Accepted Risks: There’s no way out of this fix - we’ve got to live with it, work with it and not get caught out buy it (NB. This isn’t an easy way out!) ➡ Mitigated Risks: “We’ve got a plan” to eliminate the threat of the risk (or we will 👉 When to use it? Agile: Continuously. Use ROAM to identify actions for the backlog. Traditional Project Management: Before (identify risk for a project to solve), During (the risks an in-flight project creates), at Implementation (new risk the project introduces into the business). Benefits of ROAMing: Works for individuals, teams or even at the train or programme level. Encourages collaboration and discussion about Risk Management – within a clear, systematic framework. Accountability is hard wired – there’s no “we’ll just ignore this risk” option.Is simple an easy to understand and works in both Agile and Traditional Project Management. 👉 Try: Create a ROAM Board – it works like a Kanban Board to get risks out in the open – visualise the risks with images and depictions of what could go wrong…On that point…what could possibly go wrong? Brainstorm the outcomes if a risk isn’t resolved or mitigated to help with prioritisation. Incorporate ROAM with another 4-Box Model – the Eisenhower Matric – to help identify the urgent and important Risk Management activities. Remember: ROAM provides a collaborative, actionable, proactive approach to risk management in change. You never know. You might enjoy it. Go ROAM. #AgileCoaching #ScrumMaster #VisualCommunication

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It is easy to reimagine the Agile Manifesto and see how the value statements are universally applicable to industries and domains far from their roots in technology. https://ed.gr/eeda0 #Agile

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How to teach managers to manage agile teams? I love to play the Boss-Worker Game in workshops: https://lnkd.in/e6NyxU9v #agile #leadership #management

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It's live and online! A cycle time of 1 day made it possible. What was made possible? Benjamin and I were working on a Kanban Mythbuster Template and it is now officially available on Miro Miroverse. Now together with your teams you can dive into the myths and facts of Kanban and while doing this, it is strictly allowed to have fun, fruitful conversations, new learning and hopefully new ways on how to improve your Kanban practices. And while I consider the cycle time of Miro impressive in uploading the template to their Miroverse, I'd also like to point out our own cycle time in creating the template. Cycle time: 5 days 😉 We hope you will have as much fun with the template as we had creating it. Looking forward to hear your feedback and always appreciate you sharing the learnings that it made possible. #kanban #mythbusters #mirotemplate

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"Story points are crap! Stakeholders want hours, days and dates!" Do you hear that sometimes when you propose estimating in story points or t-shirt sizes? Some managers misunderstand story point (SP) estimates as a simple kinda esoteric layer to disguise real person hour estimates. This often ends in them establishing a fixed "exchange rate" between SP and person hours. But that completely misses the point of story points and relative estimation! Yet, stakeholders are right to demand specific date ranges instead of abstract SP. They need something to plan with. And the bridge between abstract story points and specific date ranges is the concept of 👉 VELOCITY Understanding velocity lets agile teams make pretty precise predictions of when stakeholders can expect to get certain features. I explain the concept and quirks of velocity in this article in the Agile Compass: https://lnkd.in/ekzHibJQ #agile #velocity #productmanagement

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How to optimize your Scrum events? What can you do better? What are common mistakes to avoid? Here are a few secrets you might not have known. Listen to the episode. I’m sure you’ll learn something new about sprint planning, review, retro, daily scrum and the sprint itself. I feel honored to be a guest on Temitope Awere ‘s Agile Matrix Podcast. I had lots of fun sharing my experiences. And Temitope humbly threw in his deep expertise in agility, too. I’m sure it helps you improve your Scrum practice as well. #scrum #scrummaster #podcast

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A piece of shared writing with Roland Flemm that I am happy with. Elevate Product Management to Drive Business Agility. Large complex Products are ... large and complex. Hence, the desire to split them apart - because managing smaller products appears to be easier. So, usually, what large organizations identify as products are either steps in the funnel, parts of a customer journey, features, applications, components... parts of a large Product. Those smaller products are typically not well understood by the customer and business stakeholders. Those sub-products are rather parts of a bigger whole. And only that whole when put together can address customer needs, enable a business model, make a true impact and return the investments. Note the distinction between "Product" with a capital "P" and lowercase "products" in the paragraph above. That difference is essential. Org Topologies™ defines that difference as a "Product Gap". In case you missed it, the latest hype in the agile space is about "Product". Many people are talking about Product Management, Product Managers, Product Leads, Empowered Product Teams, etc. This "Product Operating Model" is the latest promise to solve all current digital product development problems. We want to stay realistic here: no new hype is going to magically solve the company's problems unless the underlying principles are changed. The "Product Operating Model" will work only when an organization closes the Product Gap. Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/dUEpGJet

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!Book an Agile Mindset Training today! 🧘 🤯 Thank you Felix Rink for this great introduction to Flight Levels and Ulrike Strauss for organizing it for the Agile Women Alliance 😍 I have a ton of takeaways, but this picture from one of the slides was my favorite (from Klaus Leopold's book "Rethinking Agile") 👇 😂 Many companies invest in huge transformation projects including - "Agile mindset training" - Complete reorganization of all teams - Implementing agile practices mostly on team level What could possibly go wrong? - Top-down "implementation" of new ways of thinking - People overwhelmed with too much change at once - Local suboptimization Can you "train" an agile mindset in a workshop? How would that work? 🧘‍♀️ What can you do instead? - Visualize the Situation - Create Focus - Establish Agile Interactions - Measure your Progress - Improve  - Repeat 🔁 Check out the Flight Levels Academy for more insights 🛫 I am already excited for the FL2D workshop with Felix in February 🤩 — 🔔 Follow me for related content… and more tasty agile cookies 🍪 🤔 Facing some challenges that keep you up at night? DM me! 🔍 Looking for a Scrum Master/Agile Coach? Feel free to reach out! 

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We often teach how the human brain is a serial processor and very very very few of us can multi-task, much less do it well. This is an awesome visual reminder to pay attention to our cognitive efficiency. #buildyourbestbrain #eddyspeaks #cognitivecapacity

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"-...The best #Scrum Teams will look like #Kanban Teams and the best Kanban Teams will look like Scrum Teams...-". This is an interesting video about knowledge work & hardware development supported by #Lean Thinking. My colleague Ronny Kant and I are interested in both approaches and regularly discuss lessons learned in the context of our daily work in the method topic group by InsurLab Germany. Thanks a lot, Ellen Zimmermann, Daniel Temmler, Dr. Philipp Johannes Nolte, and Nadine Krings for fostering critical reflection in the context of innovative product & organizational development. https://lnkd.in/ehV_X-FX #creativity #WeInnovateInsurance #crossnative

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How time flies! I cant believe I will be in Galway tomorrow to discuss some of the practical challenges when scaling Agile. Often theory is great and straightforward but can be quite complex to implement at scale. Looking forward to a great discussion with everyone there. Thanks to itag & itag Skillnet and Cisco for inviting me to speak with them. Hope to see you there! Aisling Tom Slattery Maurice Foley Orla Duffy EY EY Technology Solutions #Agile #systemicissues #agileatscale # Dee Timoney Shane Carney

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In which the witty Dr. David Burkus gives excellent advice: https://lnkd.in/ehPGaJrS #agilemanagement #leanmanagement #management #micromanagement #results #coaching #delegating #agilecoaching #leancoaching #bestteamever #respectforpeople

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Want to design powerful #agile #productdevelopment systems? Join Value Glide on the Kanban System Design course and earn an international certification that matters. Visit https://lnkd.in/e2DAtzp2 to register. #kanban #agileframework #systemdesign #projectmanager #scrummaster #productowner

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