“Some say that I should settle down, go slower and not push so hard, so quickly for such transformational change. To them, I say that you misunderstand the size of the problems we face, the strength of the status quo and the urgency of the people’s desire for change.” – Eliot Spitzer The Challenge According to the latest VersionOne State of Agile survey 2018, the most prevalent scaled agile framework in use today is SAFe. Note that I didn’t say it was the most popular framewo

One of my favorite cars that I ever owned was a 1967 Ford Falcon. I bought it for $600 when I was in college. It really wasn’t much of a car. It was a 2 door coupe built on the same frame as the classic Mustang, but without any of those muscle car good looks. It was the kind of car intended to be a hot rod for my grandmother. It had a straight six cylinder motor combined with an automatic transmission that was best described as apathetic. It had all the fundamentals you need

Agile methods like scrum and XP are very exciting, especially when you are first introduced to them. There is something very common sense about the ideas in them that seems to resonate for a lot of people. I know it was that way for me. I’d looked at a lot of different project management methods before settling on XP (thank you Steve McConnell). A lot of those methods looked interesting, but XP was the first one that just made sense. For a young project manager looking for a

We can learn the art of fierce compassion – redefining strength, deconstructing isolation and renewing a sense of community, practicing letting go of rigid us-vs.-them thinking – while cultivating power and clarity in response to difficult situations. -Sharon Salzberg Recently I’ve seen a lot of negative comments on social media criticizing SAFe and other scaling frameworks. Some of it can be chalked up to the Agile community’s typical aversion to change (ironic, isn’t it…).